Date Thesis Awarded

4-2020

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only

Degree Name

Bachelors of Science (BS)

Department

Physics

Advisor

David Armstrong

Committee Members

Keith Griffioen

Carey Bagdassarian

Abstract

The goal of PREx-II is to measure the radius of the neutron distribution in the nucleus of 208Pb to a precision of +/-1%, the original proposed goal of PREx-I. This is done by scattering polarized electrons off of a lead target, taking advantage of the parity-violating nature of the weak interaction. The difference in the scattering cross section for each helicity state allows us to extract the neutron radius of the nucleus. There can, however, be helicity-correlated beam asymmetries that are not related to the weak interaction. In order to extract these errors, we periodically modulate the beam energy and positions, and constructing a matrix equation of the responses from the position monitors. In previous parity-violating experiments, modulated data has been left out of the main data set. The goal of this thesis is to prove that the modulated data can be corrected using the same matrix equation and be included in the main data set. This has the advantage of reducing the statistical error of the experiment.

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