This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The physics program supported by this grant is directed at the study of spin and flavor structure of nucleons. Research will be carried out at the DESY laboratory in Germany as part of the HERMES collaboration, and at the Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago as part of the E906 collaboration. The main focus with HERMES will be to determine the contribution of quarks and gluons to the intrinsic angular momentum of the proton and neutron by measuring the scattering of polarized electrons on polarized targets. The program with E906 is focused on Drell/Yan production of di-muon pairs to determine the antiquark distribution in the nucleon sea. In addition, the group will lead the development and operation of the liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets as part of their hardware responsibility for this new effort. As activities on E906 will ramp up, the group's efforts on HERMES will ramp down accordingly.
Education and training of both, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars, as well as outreach aimed at the general public is an important aspect of this research program.
