Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer in Experimental Hall B.
Credit: DOE’s Jefferson Lab
New findings from Jefferson Laboratory shed light on the process of forming strange matter from ordinary matter.
Nuclear physicists have made a groundbreaking discovery through their unique analysis of experimental data. For the first time ever, they have observed the production of lambda particles, also known as “strange matter,” through a process called semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS).
The data obtained also suggests that the building blocks of protons, quarks, and gluons can sometimes march through the nucleus of an atom in pairs referred to as diquarks. The experiment was carried out at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy.
This achievement has been the culmination of many years of hard work. The data that was used in this study was originally gathered in 2004. Lamiaa El Fassi, who is currently serving as an associate professor of physics at Mississippi State University and is the lead researcher of this project, initially analyzed these data while she was working on her thesis project to obtain her graduate degree on a different topic.
Nearly a decade after completing her initial research with these data, El Fassi revisited the dataset and led her group through a careful analysis to yield these unprecedented measurements. The dataset comes from experiments in Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE user facility.
This achievement has been the culmination of many years of hard work. The data that was used in this study was originally gathered in 2004. Lamiaa El Fassi, who is currently serving as an associate professor of physics at Mississippi State University and is the lead researcher of this project, initially analyzed these data while she was working on her thesis project to obtain her graduate degree on a different topic.
Nearly a decade after completing her initial research with these data, El Fassi revisited the dataset and led her group through a careful analysis to yield these unprecedented measurements. The dataset comes from experiments in Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE user facility.
In the experiment, nuclear physicists tracked what happened when electrons from CEBAF scatter off the target nucleus and probe the confined quarks inside protons and neutrons. The results were recently published in Physical Review Letters.
“These studies help build a story, analogous to a motion picture, of how the struck quark turns into hadrons. In a new paper, we report first-ever observations of such a study for the lambda baryon in the forward and backward fragmentation regions,” El Fassi said.
“These studies help build a story, analogous to a motion picture, of how the struck quark turns into hadrons. In a new paper, we report first-ever observations of such a study for the lambda baryon in the forward and backward fragmentation regions,” El Fassi said.
In like a lambda, out like a pion
Like the more familiar protons and neutrons, each lambda is made up of three quarks. READ MORE...
Like the more familiar protons and neutrons, each lambda is made up of three quarks. READ MORE...
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