Whitney Armstrong
Postdoctoral Appointee Whitney Armstrong (PHY) will discuss his Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) sponsored work at the LDRD Seminar Series presentation Tuesday, April 3, 2018. “The CLAS12 Luminosity Upgrade: Tracking Detectors for the Next Decade and Beyond” begins at 12:30 p.m. in the Building 203 Auditorium. All are welcome to attend.
Abstract
Jefferson Lab’s 12 GeV upgrade offers a tremendous opportunity to map out the three-dimensional quark and gluon structure of nucleons and nuclei. Among the recently completed efforts of the 12 GeV upgrade, is a large acceptance spectrometer (CLAS12) which was constructed to replace Hall-B’s previous spectrometer, CLAS. Although CLAS12 will handle an order of magnitude more luminosity than its predecessor, there is still a large backlog of experiments and much of the most interesting physics is just out of reach due to the small cross sections and asymmetries. An order of magnitude increase in the running luminosity would not only allow for more experiments to run in a shorter amount of time, but it would also allow access to these small cross sections needed to study QCD at the next frontier. This talk will identify the current limitations to running at higher luminosities and identify ways to overcome them, therefore, allowing a timely completion of the currently approved experiments and making possible new experiments.
Biography
Whitney Armstrong is a postdoc in the Physics Division and is actively involved in the scientific program conducted at Jefferson Laboratory. His research is focused on understanding the role of the strong force (QCD) in hadron structure and nuclear physics. A major focus is the question of how massless quarks and gluons, which build up a massive proton, respond when a proton or neutron is placed in a nuclear medium such as a nucleus.
He is also working on the Electron Ion Collider (EIC) project and is active in Argonne’s effort to become leaders of the physics program of an EIC. Currently his efforts are focused on designing and prototyping a low energy recoil detector (ALERT) for a recently approved group of experiments that will use CLAS12 in addition to this new detector.
Armstrong joined the Physics Division’s Medium Energy Physics group in 2015 after completing his graduate and undergraduate work at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.
