The research component of this five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award will yield insights into the underlying symmetry of the quark degrees of freedom in the nucleon, the nature of the parity exchange between the incident photon and target nucleon, and will touch upon the strangeness content of the nucleon, as well as other OZI-evading processes. With his collaborators, the Principal Investigator (PI) will measure the photoproduction of vector mesons by using a beam of linearly-polarized photons from both the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) in Hall B of Jefferson Lab and the GRAAL detector at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The PI is a cospokesperson on three approved experiments, E94-109, E98-109, and E99-013, which will take place in Hall B of Jefferson Lab. With the high-quality beam of linearly-polarized photons provided, and the 4-pi detectors at these two facilities, we shall increase the world's data by a factor of approximately three orders of magnitude. This rich pool of data will allow us to accurately measure the evolution of the angular distributions of the daughter spin-0 mesons resulting from the decay of the parent vector mesons as functions of c.m. energy, and polar and azimuthal scattering angles with unprecented high precision by extracting the spin density matrix elements in a model-independent way. At his home institution, the PI has been actively engaged in developing the science component to an algebra-based pre-engineering science course in the effort to elevate awareness of physics and chemistry with the objective of increasing the retention rate of entering students. The PI is promoting physics within his department in the capacity of the faculty advisor to the Society of Physics Students (SPS). Within the wider context of the El Paso community, he is promoting physics by combining the SPS and the Physics Circus; the PI and several undergraduate students carry out a set of exciting and interactive physics demonstrations for audiences at UTEP and at area schools. In that El Paso is the gateway to Latin America, and that the student population of the primarily undergraduate University of Texas at El Paso is 66% Hispanic, establishing a high-caliber research program in experimental nuclear physics will provide unique research opportunities for Hispanic students, who traditionally have been underrepresented in physics. The funding for this CAREER grant is a crucial step towards establishing and carrying out a high-caliber medium-energy nuclear physics program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Furthermore, this research program will provide a meaningful and state-of-the-art undergraduate and master's student research experience in keeping with the mission of the NSF Model Institutions for Excellence agenda.
