Theoretical Studies of the Quark Structure of Nucleons and Nuclei

Wesleyan College, Macon GA

Investigators

Abstract

0071658 Benesh Determination of the distributions of quarks and gluons inside of the proton and there hadronic particles is one f the central topics in high energy nuclear and particle physics. The form of these distributions impacts not only our understanding of the structure of the proton, but lso affects the interpretation of experiments at higher energies which require these distributions as input. The primary focus of this proposal is the calculation of the harge asymmetric contribution to the proton sea within a variety of distinct models of the nucleon sea. A secondary focus of this proposal is the study of nuclear effects on quark distributions using phenomenological descriptions of light nuclei. Such nuclei are sufficiently tightly bound to exhibit significant nuclear modifications to their quark distributions and yet are simple enough to be modeled phenomenologically. We propose to apply models and methods that have previously been used to calculate the quark distributions of single nucleons to light nuclei in order to test the viability of these models as alternative explanations of the observed modification of quark distributions in nuclei.