This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News (Virginia), the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven (New York), and other facilities throughout the world already (and plan to) explore a variety of high energy collisions involving strongly interacting particles (like the proton) in order to reveal their substructure in terms of quarks and gluons --- the elementary entities on which Quantum Chromodynamics (the fundamental and microscopic theory of the strong interaction) is build. While in the past only a 1-dimensional picture was possible, recent developments allow one to get a 3-dimensional view of the proton and of other strongly interacting particles. The major goal of the proposed project is to provide theoretical support for the ongoing experiments and to help sharpening the plans for future experimental activities. It is also expected to get new insights on how precisely Quantum Chromodynamics can describe a certain class of high energy collisions, namely those processes where polarization of just one particle is involved. It is notoriously challenging to find the proper framework for such processes, which currently are intensely studied both from the theoretical as well as the experimental side.
The broader impact of this project, which is accompanied by a yearly lecture on theoretical particle and hadronic physics, is primarily in the training and education of graduate students. This project will also enable a greater overlap with the activities of the experimental hadron physics group at Temple University.
