Session T04: DNP Awards Session

Live

Inertial confinement fusion is a tool that may be used to for fundamental nuclear science measurements. In the method under consideration, nuclear reaction products in the expanding neutral gas following the target implosion will be collected and trapped using a turbomolecular pump. The beta-decay of reaction products with half-lives ranging between 20 ms and 10 s will be measured in-situ using a phoswich detector system starting within milliseconds after the implosion. Cross sections for several previously unmeasured low-energy deuterium and tritium reactions could be measured using this technique. To study the feasibility, several small-scale experiments are being carried out at Houghton College and SUNY Geneseo to simulate the rapid release of gas by the ICF target, its subsequent capture and decay counting.   

Live

Electron scattering from the nucleon and nuclei offers the most effective experimental approach to determine their fundamental quark and gluon structure. The precisely known and calculable QED interaction is used to probe the rich QCD structure of hadrons. Polarized beams and targets are essential to isolation of key observables. Polarized gas targets internal to electron storage rings have been successfully used over a range of incident electron beam energies to measure spin-dependent electron scattering from polarized nucleons and nuclei. They reduce systematic uncertainties due to extraneous target material as typically arises in experiments on external targets. The presentation will review the HERMES, BLAST and OLYMPUS experiments and indicate the path they lead to a future electron-ion collider.   

Not Participating

Effective field theory (EFT) provides a paradigm to describe nature through the controlled expansion of observables in a small ratio of distance scales. I will relate our progress in deploying EFTs to make sense of striking features in the emergence of nuclear structure from the Standard Model of particle physics: pseudo-Goldstone bosons (pions) provide the long-range components of the interaction among nucleons, which are singular; few-nucleon systems are close to the unitarity limit where discrete scale invariance holds; nuclei heavier than the alpha particle often have cluster substructures; nuclear matter saturates at finite binding energy per nucleon and density; and nuclei offer a unique arena to test fundamental symmetries.