JEFFERSON LAB SEARCH

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  •  One of the grand challenges of the program to image the nucleon's internal 3-dimensional quark and gluon structure is our ability to transform the observed data, presented as a collection of momentum 4-vectors of the final state particles (collectively called events

  • Lattice QCD enables the three-dimensional internal structure of hadrons such as the nucleon to be computed from first principles within QCD.  The HadStruc Collaboration exploits lattice QCD to calculate the key measures of structure, such as the one-dimensional parton distribution functions (PDFs) and form factors, and the three-dimensional measures such as the generalized parton distributions that enc

  •   Although not the main thrust of its research activities, the Theory Center provides support for experimental programs at Jefferson Lab that perform tests of fundamental symmetries of the Standard Model and searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

  • The Jefferson Lab Theory Center pursues frontline research in all areas of QCD and hadron physics, commits to the lab mission to provide the theoretical underpinnings of its experimental program, and develops the theoretical tools necessary to extract physics knowledge from the current and future experimental data. Through expertise across a broad range of nuclear physics, Theory Center staff members provide leadership for national and international nuclear physics research efforts.

    The Theory Center's current research focuses on the following thrust areas:

  • The connection between partons and hadrons is quantified in terms of a variety of partonic distributions functions. These are nonperturbative objects, which until recently could only be accessed indirectly from experimental lepton-hadron data. Recently, there has been tremendous progress to access these distribution functions directly from QCD, using the only systematic non-perturbative tool in the market, lattice QCD.

  •  Hadrons are emergent phenomena of QCD at distance scales greater than about 1 fm, where the dynamics is governed by the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, color confinement, and topological effects. Explaining hadron structure and interactions requires methods based on effective degrees of freedom and clear principles for constructing the effective dynamics.

  • The determination of the three-dimensional structure of hadrons in terms of the fundamental quark and gluon (or parton) degrees of freedom of QCD is a central mission of the Jefferson Lab science program.

  • Hadron spectroscopy is key to understanding of the enigmatic properties of QCD, such as confinement, dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, emergence of topological matter, etc.

  • The research activity in this area deals, in broad terms, with the fundamental issue of understanding the structure and dynamics of nuclei in terms of the many-body (primarily, two- and three-body) strong forces governing the interactions among their constituents, i.e., the nucleons, and the response of nuclei to electromagnetic and weak probes in terms of the coupling of these probes to individual nucleons and