JLab APS Centennial Presentations | |||||
Measurement of the Weak Neutral Form Factor of the Proton at Jefferson Laboratory Session VP05 - Postdeadline Poster Session I. POSTER session, Thursday morning, March 25 Hallway, GWCC P. A. Souder (Syracuse University), HAPPEX Collaboration
The proton, a state of three quarks bound by the
strong force of QCD, also has a ``sea'' of quark-antiquark pairs that
includes strange quarks. A fundamental issue is how much
these strange quarks contribute to the charge radius and
magnetic moment of the proton. A particularly clean experimental technique
for isolating these effects is measuring
parity-violation asymmetry A_PV in the elastic scattering of polarized
electrons from protons. From A_PV, we can cleanly extract the
strangeness contributions to the elastic form factors, G_E^s and G_M^s.
The strange form factors provide a direct measure of the strangeness
contribution to the proton's radius and magnetic moment. In
Hall A at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab),
the HAPPEX collaboration measured A_PV at the kinematic point
(\langle\theta_\mathrm lab\rangle=
12.3^\circ and
\langle Q^2\rangle=0.48 (GeV/c)^2).
From our data, we can extract the combination
G_E^_s+0.39 G_M^s=0.023\pm0.034(stat)\pm0.022(syst)\pm0.026(\delta G_E^n), where
the
last error results from the uncertainty in G_E^n.
The result places a significant limit on the size of the effects
of strangeness in the nucleon.
The relative ease with which we were able to measure a
small asymmetry at JLab bodes well for the future of experiments measuring
parity-violating amplitudes.
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