Hunter Duggin

Gravitational Form Factors of the Unitary Fermi Gas

Gravitational form factors (GFFs) describe the internal structure of particles within a given system. They give us a look into how quantities like the mass, energy, and pressure are distributed within a given system. The system we are examining in this project is a fermi gas tuned to the unitary limit (infinite scattering length). This limit lets us extract scale invariant (conformal) physics from our data. The computation is done by discretizing an effective field theory called pionless-EFT and performing lattice monte carlo simulations to obtain correlation functions. I am helping aid in the analysis by resampling the data using bootstrapping and plotting the effective mass of the system using lsqfit at arbitrary momentum.

This project is being done under the direction of Dr. Amy Nicholson & Mr. Charles Kacir at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Future endeavors include Lattice QCD calculations.

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Polarized He-3 Target Setup

Electromagnetic Form Factors (EMFFs) describe the distribution of electric charge within a system, in analogy to the previously mentioned GFFs. These quantities can be measured experimentally, but for charge neutral particles, the issue of physically trapping the particles becomes a non-trivial issue. If we wanted to measure the EMFFs of the neutron, we'd need to use a charged nucleus, wherein the spin information is concentrated on the neutron. For this project, I aided in the experimental equipment setup and design of these high performance polarized He-3 targets.

The project was headed by Dr. Arun Tadepalli, staff scientist at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. My responsibilities were experimentalequipmentcalibration,RadCon II (contamination) training, Cleaning / repairing contaminated Helmholtz coils, Back end electronics, etc.

I presented this work at the Jefferson Lab annual summer student poster presentation in August of 2024, my poster can be found here

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Interpolating the 't Hooft Model Between Instant and Front Forms in the Coulomb Gauge

At high probe energies, sea quark contributions to the hadron become highly non trivial, and we need a way to quantify their distribution. This gives rise to the parton distribution function (PDF) which discribes such distribution. Theoretically calculating these observables PDFs leads to a number of challenges, namely reaching the light front at high enough energies. This motivates the use of interpolation between the intant and front forms to connect every day physics to light front physics. Doing so, we can create an alternative quai-PDF, and interpolating in the Coulomb gauge allows us to potentially solve the well known Pi-0 problem.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Chueng Ji, Professor at North Carolina State university and Bailing Ma, Postdoc at ANL.

I presented this work at a number of different conferences listed here:
Spin 2023 Proceedings
JPS / APS DNP Joint Meeting 2023 Slides
NCUR 2024 Long Beach Poster
APS April Meeting 2024