Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session C16: Loop Quantum Gravity and History of Physics
1:30 PM–3:18 PM,
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Sheraton
Room: Grand Ballroom I
Sponsoring
Unit:
DGRAV
Chair: Ivan Agullo, Louisiana State University
Abstract: C16.00009 : Using the SLAC 8 GeV Spectrometer to Probe Nucleon Structure, 1968–1986
3:06 PM–3:18 PM
View Presentation Abstract
Presenter:
Michael Riordan
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
Author:
Michael Riordan
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
The year 2019 can be viewed as the 50th anniversary of the discovery of quarks, as two pivotal papers on deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering were published in Physical Review Letters that October. But it would take another five years or more before the physics community became fully convinced that quarks existed. A pivotal detector facility involved in this discovery process was the SLAC 8 GeV Spectrometer, on which I performed my MIT Ph.D. and postdoctoral research. Unlike the 20 GeV Spectrometer used in the initial deep-inelastic scattering experiments, it could readily roll out to large angles and detect electrons that had scattered at high momentum transfers Q2, enabling experimenters to test and confirm the structure-function scaling predictions of Bjorken and Feynman, which proved crucial in verifying the suggested point-like nucleon substructure. This highly flexible detector allowed physicists their first detailed look at the new “hard-scattering” regime discussed by Andrew Pickering in his 1984 book Constructing Quarks. If time permits, I will discuss the use of this spectrometer in separating the two nucleon structure functions W1 and W2 and, equivalently, determining the ratio R = σL/σT, which was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis and later research.
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