So last Friday's Colloquium was about the science program at Jefferson Lab. Jefferson Lab is an electron accelerator, located in Newport News, Virginia. The talk was presented by the Associate Director for Experimental Nuclear Physics (read powerful guy who decides when experiments get done), Dr Lawrence Cardman. Aside from the fact that I was distracted because his name makes me think of "South Park" I thought Dr Cardman gave a good talk. But I'd be interested to know what people who are less familiar with Jefferson Lab's scientific program thought. As Dr Cardman said, they've done 140 experiments now, so that's a lot of ground to cover. And he talked about a lot of different stuff in his one hour: probably each one of the experiments he talked about could've (and has in some cases!) had a whole Colloquium of its own.
I was also intrigued by the emphasis on "nuclear physics is to QCD what molecular physics is to QED". Do people find this to be a helpful analogy? If that's true what does it imply about what the important problems in nuclear physics are?
1 comment:
Hi Dr. Phillips, I liked the idea of blog. Regarding last friday talk, though most of it passed way over my head, the issue of electron scattering from single quark and the related difficulties caught my attention. So, as a good physics student, I 'googled' the topic and found a term Quark-hadron duality. I would appreciate if some one can elaborate this term in a 'non QCD' language. Is the term 'duality' refers to the indistinguishable response to the electron scattering ?. one more naive question, what makes people believe that quarks are point like particles when all they can observe is the hadronic state of quarks?
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