Nucleon Tomography Studies at Jefferson Lab

Protons and neutrons, are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. They constitute over 99 percent of the mass of the matter in the visible universe. A fundamental challenge of modern nuclear physics is to understand the structure of these constituents.  The 12 GeV Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab and the construction of state-of –the-art detector systems make it a unique facility in the world to address this challenge. Electron scattering is a superb experimental tool to study the internal structure of nucleons at differing distance scales, as the resolving power of the probe can be varied.  The CEBAF Upgrade was completed in September 2017 and the new generation of experiments has started. These experiments will enable a collaboration of scientists from around the world to perform precise experiments of exclusive processes covering a large range in kinematics to effectively engage in nuclear imaging, revealing hidden aspects of its internal structure, and providing insight into quark confinement forces in the nucleon, one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics. 

 

The Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) provide the theoretical framework to interpret the experimental data in terms of 3-dimensional imaging. In addition, recent development demonstrated that the GPD formalism enables access to the nucleon’s Gravitational Form Factors that encode its mechanical properties. We will focus on the study of the Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS), the most effective way to access GPDs. We will review the landscape of both theory and experiment, and discuss the latest results from Jefferson Lab at 6 GeV in comparison with results from other facilities, and present a first look at the new experiments with the 12 GeV Upgrade.