Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Testing the Feasibility of Extracting the Strange Distribution in Nucleon

Student: Rohan Venkat

School: University of Chicago

Mentored By: Nobuo Sato

The structure of nucleons in terms of quarks and gluons is an important area of particle physics. Nucleons are particles such as protons and neutrons, and they are composed of quarks bound together by gluons. There are 6 flavors of quarks: the up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange quarks. Moreover, all quarks have their own value to a property known as strangeness. This property, while having a value of zero for the up and bottom quarks, is nonzero for the gluon which implies that the strangeness content within nucleons should be nonzero. The goal of this project is to test the feasibility of extracting the strange distribution from charge asymmetries in the valence region within nucleons.

[Watch the presentation on YouTube]