Welcome to my webpage at Jefferson Lab! I am a Ph.D. student in Experimental Nuclear Physics in the Physics Department at The College of William and Mary.
Click on the links below for a current version of my curriculum vitae, résumé, publications list, and a list of my presentations: Click on the links below to go to my Quantum Diary, a webdiary I kept during the World Year of Physics in 2005 along with 35 other particle physicists as part of a public outreach project to show people what it is like to be a physicist:
The G0 experiment is a parity-violating electron scattering experiment that is being carried out at Jefferson Lab in Hall C. The goal of the experiment is to measure the parity-violating asymmetries from the elastic scattering of electrons off protons in order to determine the strange quark sea's contribution to the structure of the proton. To accomplish this, polarized electrons are scattered off from an unpolarized liquid hydrogen target and the asymmetry of the elastically recoiled proton rates between the two different electron spin states is measured. Using this parity-violating asymmetry, we can determine the electro-weak neutral current structure of the proton, and by combining this with the knowledge of the electro-magnetic structures of the proton and neutron measured in other experiments, we can determine the contribution of the strange quark to the electromagnetic properties of the nucleon.
The experiment has two primary phases: the forward-angle measurement, which was completed in May of 2004, and the backward-angle measurements, which just finished running in Hall C in fall 2007. The data analysis is underway!
Here is a list of some of the interesting projects I have worked on for the G0 experiment:
I am also involved in the HAPPEX experiment in Jefferson Lab's Hall A. The HAPPEX experimental program is also designed to investigate the strange-quark contributions to the structure of the nucleon. Instead of measuring these parity-violating asymmetries over a range of momentum transfer values (Q2) like the G0 experiment, the HAPPEX experiment measured these asymmetries very precisely at Q2 = 0.1 (GeV/c)2 on both a hydrogen and a helium-4 target.