505 research outputs found
Short-Distance Structure of Nuclei
One of Jefferson Lab's original missions was to further our understanding of
the short-distance structure of nuclei. In particular, to understand what
happens when two or more nucleons within a nucleus have strongly overlapping
wave-functions; a phenomena commonly referred to as short-range correlations.
Herein, we review the results of the (e,e'), (e,e'p) and (e,e'pN) reactions
that have been used at Jefferson Lab to probe this short-distance structure as
well as provide an outlook for future experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, for publication in Journal of Physics
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Material unaccounted for at the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor: The SEFOR MUF
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission contracted with the General Electric Company to design, construct, and operate the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) to measure the Doppler effect for fast neutron breeder reactors. It contracted with Nuclear Fuel Services to fabricate the fuel rods for the reactor. When the reactor went critical in May, 1969, it appeared that some of the mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel rods did not contain the specified quantity of plutonium. The SEFOR operators soon found several fuel rods which appeared to be low in plutonium. The safeguards group at Brookhaven was asked to look into the problem and, if possible, determine how much plutonium was missing from the unirradiated rods and from the larger number which had been slightly irradiated in the reactor. It was decided that the plutonium content of the unirradiated and irradiated rods could be measured relative to a reference rod using a high resolution gamma-ray detector and also by neutron measurements using an auto-correlation circuit recently developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). During the next two years, Brookhaven personnel and C.V. Strain of NRL made several trips to the SEFOR reactor. About 250 of the 775 rods were measured by two or more methods, using a sodium-iodide detector, a high-resolution germanium detector, a neutron detector, or the reactor (to measure reactivity). The research team concluded that 4.6 {+-} 0.46 kg of plutonium was missing out of the 433 kg that the rods should have contained. This report describes the SEFOR experiment and the procedures used to determine the material unaccounted for, or MUF
Hadrons in the Nuclear Medium
Quantum Chromodynamics, the microscopic theory of strong interactions, has
not yet been applied to the calculation of nuclear wave functions. However, it
certainly provokes a number of specific questions and suggests the existence of
novel phenomena in nuclear physics which are not part of the the traditional
framework of the meson-nucleon description of nuclei. Many of these phenomena
are related to high nuclear densities and the role of color in nucleonic
interactions. Quantum fluctuations in the spatial separation between nucleons
may lead to local high density configurations of cold nuclear matter in nuclei,
up to four times larger than typical nuclear densities. We argue here that
experiments utilizing the higher energies available upon completion of the
Jefferson Laboratory energy upgrade will be able to probe the quark-gluon
structure of such high density configurations and therefore elucidate the
fundamental nature of nuclear matter. We review three key experimental
programs: quasi-elastic electro-disintegration of light nuclei, deep inelastic
scattering from nuclei at , and the measurement of tagged structure
functions. These interrelated programs are all aimed at the exploration of the
quark structure of high density nuclear configurations.
The study of the QCD dynamics of elementary hard processes is another
important research direction and nuclei provide a unique avenue to explore
these dynamics. We argue that the use of nuclear targets and large values of
momentum transfer at would allow us to determine whether the physics of the
nucleon form factors is dominated by spatially small configurations of three
quarks.Comment: 52 pages IOP style LaTex file and 20 eps figure
Neutron Valence Structure From Nuclear Deep Inelastic Scattering
Mechanisms of spin-flavor SU(6) symmetry breaking in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) are studied via an extraction of the free neutron structure function from a global analysis of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) data on the proton and on nuclei from A = 2 (deuterium) to 208 (lead). Modification of the structure function of nucleons bound in atomic nuclei (known as the EMC effect) are consistently accounted for within the framework of a universal modification of nucleons in short-range correlated (SRC) pairs. Our extracted neutron-to-proton structure function ratio Fn2/Fp2 becomes constant for xB ≥ 0.6, equaling 0.47 ± 0.04 as xB → 1, in agreement with theoretical predictions of perturbative QCD and the Dyson-Schwinger equation, and in disagreement with predictions of the scalar diquark dominance model. We also predict F32He/F32H, recently measured, as yet unpublished, by the MARATHON Collaboration, the nuclear correction function that is needed to extract Fn2/Fp2 from F32He/F32H, and the theoretical uncertainty associated with this extraction
Search for a bound di-neutron by comparing He(e,e'p)d and H(e,e'p)X measurements
We report on a search for a bound di-neutron by comparing electron-induced
proton-knockout measurements from Helium-3 (He) and Tritium
(H). The measurements were performed at Jefferson Lab Hall A with a 4.326
GeV electron beam, and kinematics of large momentum transfer
(GeV/) and , to minimize contributions from non quasi-elastic
(QE) reaction mechanisms. Analyzing the measured He missing mass
() and missing energy () distributions, we can distinguish
the two-body break-up reaction, in which the residual proton-neutron system
remains bound as a deuteron. In the H mirror case, under the exact same
kinematic conditions, we do not identify a signature for a bound di-neutron
with similar binding energy to that of the deuteron. We calculate exclusion
limits as a function of the di-neutron binding energy and find that, for
binding equivalent to the deuteron, the two-body break-up cross section on
H is less than 0.9% of that on He in the measured kinematics at the 95%
confidence level.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Probing the Repulsive Core of the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction via the 4He( e, e′ pN) Triple-Coincidence Reaction
We studied simultaneously the 4He(e,e′p), 4He (e,e′pp), and 4He( e,e′pn) reactions at Q2 = 2(GeV/c)2 and xB \u3e 1,for an (e,e′p) missing-momentum range of 400 to 830 MeV/c. The knocked-out proton was detected in coincidence with a proton or neutron recoiling almost back to back to the missing momentum, leaving the residual A = 2 system at low excitation energy. These data were used to identify two-nucleon short-range correlated pairs and to deduce their isospin structure as a function of missing momentum, in a region where the nucleon-nucleon (NN) force is expected to change from predominantly tensor to repulsive. The abundance of neutron-proton pairs is reduced as the nucleon momentum increases beyond ∼500 MeV/c. The extracted fraction of proton-proton pairs is small and almost independent of the missing momentum. Our data are compared with calculations of two-nucleon momentum distributions in 4He and discussed in the context of probing the elusive repulsive component of the NN force
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