Speaker
Dr
Kijun Park
(Old Dominion University)
Description
An Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) would enable measurements of neutron structure
through deep-inelastic electron-deuteron scattering with coincidence tagging of
the forward-moving spectator proton (``spectator tagging''). This technique
allows one to positively identify the active neutron and control its quantum
state in the deuteron through measurement of the recoil proton momentum.
A R&D project at Jefferson Lab has established the feasibility of spectator tagging,
including measurements of neutron spin structure with a polarized deuteron beam.
In this study, we developed a Monte Carlo simulation on the GEANT4 modular framework
with the physical processes and the MEIC accelerator and detector/IR/forard tagger design
and used to optimize the analysis strategy. A novel technique
is implemented for obtaining the free neutron structure function by extrapolating
the measured recoil momentum distributions to the on-shell point. Such measurements
provide essential information for the flavor separation of the nucleon parton densities,
the nucleon spin decomposition, and precision studies of QCD evolution in the
flavor-singlet and non-singlet sectors. The EMC effect in light nuclei can be
elucidated by studying the recoil momentum dependence of the nuclear modification
away from the on-shell point. In this talk we describe the proposed experimental
setup and analysis procedure, and present results of a model-independent extraction
of the free neutron structure through on-shell extrapolation, both for the unpolarized
(F_2n) and the polarized neutron structure functions (g_1n).
Primary author
Dr
Kijun Park
(Old Dominion University)
Co-authors
Prof.
Charles Hyde
(Old Dominion University)
Dr
Christian Weiss
(Jefferson Lab)
Dr
Douglas Higinbotham
(Jefferson Lab)
Dr
Pawel Nadel-Turonski
(Jefferson Lab)
