Nuclear Particle Astrophysics (NPA) Seminar: Or Hen, MIT, “Short Range Correlations and the EMC effect”

Event time: 
Thursday, August 2, 2018 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Wright Lab (WL), 216 See map
272 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

The atomic nucleus is one of the most complex strongly-interacting many-body systems in nature. A main challenge in describing nuclei is understanding the short interparticle part of the nuclear wave function and how it may impact the internal, quark-gluon, structure of nuclei. In this talk I will describe recent high-energy proton and electron scattering experiments which shows that short-range interactions between the nucleons form correlated, high-momentum, neutron-proton pairs, known as Short-Range Correlations (SRC). These pairs are observed to account for 20% of the nucleons in the nucleus, and 60-70% of the kinetic energy carried by nucleons in nuclei. On a different energy scale I will present new measurements of the internal structure of nucleons bound in nuclei and show how its modification relates to nuclear SRCs. Given time I will also discuss the development of new effective theories for describing short-ranged correlations, the way in which they relate to experimental observables, and the emerging universality of short-distance and high-momentum physics in nuclear systems.