Date Awarded

2009

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

Physics

Advisor

David Armstrong

Abstract

The goal of the G0 experiment is to determine the contribution of the strange quarks in the quark-antiquark sea to the structure of the nucleon. to this end, the experiment measured parity-violating asymmetries from elastic electron-proton scattering from 0.12 ≤ Q2 ≤ 1.0 (GeV/ c)2 at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. These asymmetries come from the interference of the electromagnetic and neutral weak interactions, and are sensitive to the strange quark contributions in the proton. The results from the forward angle measurement, the linear combination of the strange electric and magnetic form factors GsE + etaGsM, suggest possible non-zero, Q 2 dependent, strange quark contributions and provide new information to understand the magnitude of the contributions. This dissertation presents the analysis and results of the forward-angle measurement.;In addition, the G0 experiment measured the beam-normal single-spin asymmetry in the elastic scattering of transversely polarized 3 GeV electrons from unpolarized protons at Q2 = 0.15, 0.25 (GeV/c) 2 as part of the forward-angle measurement. The transverse asymmetry provides a direct probe of the imaginary component of the two-photon exchange amplitude, the complete description of which is important in the interpretation of data from precision electron-scattering experiments. The results of the measurement indicate that calculations using solely the elastic nucleon intermediate state are insufficient and generally agree with calculations that include significant inelastic hadronic intermediate state contributions. This dissertation presents the analysis and results of this measurement.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-p14g-sq23

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© The Author

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