This award facilitates a three-year international collaborative research project between Professor Kyungseon Joo of the Physics Department of the University of Connecticut and Professor Wooyoung Kim of the Physics Department of Kyungpook National University in Korea. A graduate student and post-doctoral fellow working with Professor Joo will participate in the collaborative research and travel to Korea.
Intellectual Merit
The main focus of Dr. Joo's research is in electromagnetic excitation of nucleon resonances. This area of physics research is aimed at understanding the internal structure and dynamics of the nucleon and addressing long-standing questions about the relevant sub-nucleon degrees of freedom. This is one of the important problems in hadron physics. There are only isolated energies where enough information exists to make a completely model-dependant analysis. The particular goal of this collaborative research is to determine the fifth structure function (sigma-LT-prime) for single pion electron in the specific resonance region "delta-1232." To accomplish this, Dr. Joo and his collaborator will make use of the electron beam Large Acceptance Spectrometer of the Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, which is uniquely suited for study of nucleon resonances physics. The measurements they obtain will provide important information about the interference between resonant and non-resonant terms and help to understand the structure of nucleon in the framework of strong Quantum Chromodynamics.
Broader Impacts
This collaboration strengthens the links between two very active research groups in the U.S. and Korea that have complementary expertise. It also enhances the training of young physicists in a frontier area of fundamental physics, which is important to keep the field strong. A graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Connecticut gain international research experience by visiting Professor Kim's research group in Korea. The cost of this research is shared because Professor Kim's research is supported by the Korean Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF).
