Hard probes of short-range nucleon–nucleon correlations Arrington, J.; Higinbotham, D.W.; Rosner, G. ...
Progress in particle and nuclear physics,
October 2012, 2012-10-00, 2012-10-01, Letnik:
67, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is providing a complete description of the structure of atomic nuclei. While mean-field calculations provide detailed information on the nuclear shell ...structure for a wide range of nuclei, they do not capture the complete structure of nuclei, in particular the impact of small, dense structures in nuclei. The strong, short-range component of the nucleon–nucleon potential yields hard interactions between nucleons which are close together, generating a high-momentum tail to the nucleon momentum distribution, with momenta well in excess of the Fermi momentum. This high-momentum component of the nuclear wave-function is one of the most poorly understood parts of nuclear structure.
Utilizing high-energy probes, we can isolate scattering from high-momentum nucleons, and use these measurements to examine the structure and impact of short-range nucleon–nucleon correlations. Over the last decade we have moved from looking for evidence of such short-range structures to mapping out their strength in nuclei and examining their isospin structure. This has been made possible by high-luminosity and high-energy accelerators, coupled with an improved understanding of the reaction mechanism issues involved in studying these structures. We review the general issues related to short-range correlations, survey recent experiments aimed at probing these short-range structures, and lay out future possibilities to further these studies.
The atomic nucleus is made of protons and neutrons (nucleons), which are themselves composed of quarks and gluons. Understanding how the quark-gluon structure of a nucleon bound in an atomic nucleus ...is modified by the surrounding nucleons is an outstanding challenge. Although evidence for such modification-known as the EMC effect-was first observed over 35 years ago, there is still no generally accepted explanation for its cause
. Recent observations suggest that the EMC effect is related to close-proximity short-range correlated (SRC) nucleon pairs in nuclei
. Here we report simultaneous, high-precision measurements of the EMC effect and SRC abundances. We show that EMC data can be explained by a universal modification of the structure of nucleons in neutron-proton SRC pairs and present a data-driven extraction of the corresponding universal modification function. This implies that in heavier nuclei with many more neutrons than protons, each proton is more likely than each neutron to belong to an SRC pair and hence to have distorted quark structure. This universal modification function will be useful for determining the structure of the free neutron and thereby testing quantum chromodynamics symmetry-breaking mechanisms and may help to discriminate between nuclear physics effects and beyond-the-standard-model effects in neutrino experiments.
The atomic nucleus is one of the densest and most complex quantum-mechanical systems in nature. Nuclei account for nearly all the mass of the visible Universe. The properties of individual nucleons ...(protons and neutrons) in nuclei can be probed by scattering a high-energy particle from the nucleus and detecting this particle after it scatters, often also detecting an additional knocked-out proton. Analysis of electron- and proton-scattering experiments suggests that some nucleons in nuclei form close-proximity neutron-proton pairs
with high nucleon momentum, greater than the nuclear Fermi momentum. However, how excess neutrons in neutron-rich nuclei form such close-proximity pairs remains unclear. Here we measure protons and, for the first time, neutrons knocked out of medium-to-heavy nuclei by high-energy electrons and show that the fraction of high-momentum protons increases markedly with the neutron excess in the nucleus, whereas the fraction of high-momentum neutrons decreases slightly. This effect is surprising because in the classical nuclear shell model, protons and neutrons obey Fermi statistics, have little correlation and mostly fill independent energy shells. These high-momentum nucleons in neutron-rich nuclei are important for understanding nuclear parton distribution functions (the partial momentum distribution of the constituents of the nucleon) and changes in the quark distributions of nucleons bound in nuclei (the EMC effect)
. They are also relevant for the interpretation of neutrino-oscillation measurements
and understanding of neutron-rich systems such as neutron stars
.
Neutrinos exist in one of three types or 'flavours'-electron, muon and tau neutrinos-and oscillate from one flavour to another when propagating through space. This phenomena is one of the few that ...cannot be described using the standard model of particle physics (reviewed in ref.
), and so its experimental study can provide new insight into the nature of our Universe (reviewed in ref.
). Neutrinos oscillate as a function of their propagation distance (L) divided by their energy (E). Therefore, experiments extract oscillation parameters by measuring their energy distribution at different locations. As accelerator-based oscillation experiments cannot directly measure E, the interpretation of these experiments relies heavily on phenomenological models of neutrino-nucleus interactions to infer E. Here we exploit the similarity of electron-nucleus and neutrino-nucleus interactions, and use electron scattering data with known beam energies to test energy reconstruction methods and interaction models. We find that even in simple interactions where no pions are detected, only a small fraction of events reconstruct to the correct incident energy. More importantly, widely used interaction models reproduce the reconstructed energy distribution only qualitatively and the quality of the reproduction varies strongly with beam energy. This shows both the need and the pathway to improve current models to meet the requirements of next-generation, high-precision experiments such as Hyper-Kamiokande (Japan)
and DUNE (USA)
.
The OLYMPUS Collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, R_{2γ}, a direct measure of the contribution of hard two-photon ...exchange to the elastic cross section. In the OLYMPUS measurement, 2.01 GeV electron and positron beams were directed through a hydrogen gas target internal to the DORIS storage ring at DESY. A toroidal magnetic spectrometer instrumented with drift chambers and time-of-flight scintillators detected elastically scattered leptons in coincidence with recoiling protons over a scattering angle range of ≈20° to 80°. The relative luminosity between the two beam species was monitored using tracking telescopes of interleaved gas electron multiplier and multiwire proportional chamber detectors at 12°, as well as symmetric Møller or Bhabha calorimeters at 1.29°. A total integrated luminosity of 4.5 fb^{-1} was collected. In the extraction of R_{2γ}, radiative effects were taken into account using a Monte Carlo generator to simulate the convolutions of internal bremsstrahlung with experiment-specific conditions such as detector acceptance and reconstruction efficiency. The resulting values of R_{2γ}, presented here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization 0.456<ε<0.978, are smaller than some hadronic two-photon exchange calculations predict, but are in reasonable agreement with a subtracted dispersion model and a phenomenological fit to the form factor data.
Short-range correlated (SRC) nucleon pairs are a vital part of the nucleus, accounting for almost all nucleons with momentum greater than the Fermi momentum (k_{F}). A fundamental characteristic of ...SRC pairs is having large relative momenta as compared to k_{F}, and smaller center of mass (c.m.) which indicates a small separation distance between the nucleons in the pair. Determining the c.m. momentum distribution of SRC pairs is essential for understanding their formation process. We report here on the extraction of the c.m. motion of proton-proton (pp) SRC pairs in carbon and, for the first time in heavier and ansymetric nuclei: aluminum, iron, and lead, from measurements of the A(e,e^{'}pp) reaction. We find that the pair c.m. motion for these nuclei can be described by a three-dimensional Gaussian with a narrow width ranging from 140 to 170 MeV/c, approximately consistent with the sum of two mean-field nucleon momenta. Comparison with calculations appears to show that the SRC pairs are formed from mean-field nucleons in specific quantum states.
Unpolarized and beam-polarized fourfold cross sections (d^{4}σ/dQ^{2}dx_{B}dtdϕ) for the ep→e^{'}p^{'}γ reaction were measured using the CLAS detector and the 5.75-GeV polarized electron beam of the ...Jefferson Lab accelerator, for 110 (Q^{2},x_{B},t) bins over the widest phase space ever explored in the valence-quark region. Several models of generalized parton distributions (GPDs) describe the data well at most of our kinematics. This increases our confidence that we understand the GPD H, expected to be the dominant contributor to these observables. Through a leading-twist extraction of Compton form factors, these results support the model predictions of a larger nucleon size at lower quark-momentum fraction x_{B}.
A
bstract
A comprehensive set of azimuthal single-spin and double-spin asymmetries in semi-inclusive leptoproduction of pions, charged kaons, protons, and antiprotons from transversely polarized ...protons is presented. These asymmetries include the previously published HERMES results on Collins and Sivers asymmetries, the analysis of which has been extended to include protons and antiprotons and also to an extraction in a three-dimensional kinematic binning and enlarged phase space. They are complemented by corresponding results for the remaining four single-spin and four double-spin asymmetries allowed in the one-photon-exchange approximation of the semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering process for target-polarization orientation perpendicular to the direction of the incoming lepton beam. Among those results, significant non-vanishing cos (
ϕ−ϕ
S
) modulations provide evidence for a sizable worm-gear (II) distribution,
g
1
T
q
x
p
T
2
. Most of the other modulations are found to be consistent with zero with the notable exception of large sin (
ϕ
S
) modulations for charged pions and
K
+
.
Measuring the spin structure of protons and neutrons tests our understanding of how they arise from quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of nuclear matter. At long distances, the ...coupling constant of the strong interaction becomes large, requiring non-perturbative methods to calculate quantum chromodynamics processes, such as lattice gauge theory or effective field theories. Here we report proton spin structure measurements from scattering a polarized electron beam off polarized protons. The spin-dependent cross-sections were measured at large distances, corresponding to the region of low momentum transfer squared between 0.012 and 1.0 GeV2. This kinematic range provides unique tests of chiral effective field theory predictions. Our results show that a complete description of the nucleon spin remains elusive, and call for further theoretical works, for example, in lattice quantum chromodynamics. Finally, our data extrapolated to the photon point agree with the Gerasimov–Drell–Hearn sum rule, a fundamental prediction of quantum field theory that relates the anomalous magnetic moment of the proton to its integrated spin-dependent cross-sections.Measurements of the proton’s spin structure in experiments scattering a polarized electron beam off polarized protons in regions of low momentum transfer squared test predictions from chiral effective field theory of the strong interaction.
The reactions γp→ηp and γp→η^{'}p are measured from their thresholds up to the center-of-mass energy W=1.96 GeV with the tagged-photon facilities at the Mainz Microtron, MAMI. Differential cross ...sections are obtained with unprecedented statistical accuracy, providing fine energy binning and full production-angle coverage. A strong cusp is observed in the total cross section for η photoproduction at the energies in the vicinity of the η^{'} threshold, W=1896 MeV (E_{γ}=1447 MeV). Within the framework of a revised ηMAID isobar model, the cusp, in connection with a steep rise of the η^{'} total cross section from its threshold, can only be explained by a strong coupling of the poorly known N(1895)1/2^{-} state to both ηp and η^{'}p. Including the new high-accuracy results in the ηMAID fit to available η and η^{'} photoproduction data allows the determination of the N(1895)1/2^{-} properties.
PDF
