Session X16: DNP Prize Session

Pipken Award: Nuclear physics mysteries revealed by precision ion trap measurements

Nuclear Physics is a fundamental science discipline for over 100 years, and started with precision measurements by Rutherford. Much has been learned and understood in the meantime, but some questions remain and also new nuclear phenomena have been discovered. Precision experiments open new venue to address these. Ion trap technologies, originally conceived for atomic and molecular physics have been adapted to the specific requirements stemming from nuclear physics, for example, to couple ion traps to accelerators and achieve very high speed and efficiencies. In this talk I will show some recent examples and technical developments pertaining to nuclear physics questions and phenomena and how they are addressed with precision ion trap measurements.   

Bonner Prize: The Elastic Form Factors of the Nucleon

A series of experiments initiated in 1998 at the then new Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator, or CEBAF in Newport News Virginia, resulted in unexpected results, changing significantly our understanding of the structure of the proton. These experiments used a relatively new technique to obtain the ratio of the two form factors of the proton, namely polarization. An intense beam of highly polarized electrons with energy up to 6 GeV was made to interact elastically with un-polarized protons in a hydrogen target. The polarization of the recoiling protons, with energies up to 5 GeV, was measured from a second interaction in a polarimeter consisting of blocs of graphite or CH2 and tracking wire chambers. The scattered electrons were detected in an electromagnetic lead-glass calorimeter, to select elastically scattered events. After a short introduction describing the path which brought me from the University of Geneva to the College of William and Mary in 1966, I will introduce the subject of elastic electron scattering, describe some of the apparatus required for such experiments, and show the results which were unexpected at the time. These results demonstrated unequivocally that the two form factors required to describe elastic ep scattering, electric G$_{\mathrm{E}}$ and magnetic G$_{\mathrm{M}}$ in the Born approximation, had a drastically different dependence upon the four-momentum squared q$^{\mathrm{2}}= $ q$^{\mathrm{2}}-\omega ^{\mathrm{2}}$ with q the momentum, and $\omega $ the energy transferred in the reaction. The finding, in flagrant disagreement with the data available at the time, which had been obtained dominantly from cross section measurements of the type first used by Nobel Prize R. Hofstadter 60 years ago, have led to a reexamination of the information provided by form factors on the structure of the nucleon, in particular its quark-gluon content. The conclusion will then be a brief outline of several theoretical considerations to put the results in a proper perspective.   

Feshbach Prize: New Phenomena and New Physics from Strongly-Correlated Quantum Matter

Strongly correlated quantum matter is ubiquitous in physics from cold atoms to nuclei to the cold dense matter found in neutron stars. Experiments from table-top to the extremely large scale experiments including FRIB and LIGO will help determine the properties of matter across an incredible scale of distances and energies. Questions to be addressed include the existence of exotic states of matter in cold atoms and nuclei, the response of this correlated matter to external probes, and the behavior of matter in extreme astrophysical environments. A more complete understanding is required, both to understand these diverse phenomena and to employ this understanding to probe for new underlying physics in experiments including neutrinoless double beta decay and accelerator neutrino experiments. I will summarize some aspects of our present understanding and highlight several important prospects for the future.