Duke Physics Colloquium: Exploring QCD Dynamics and Proton Structure in Polarized p-p Scattering and e+e- Annihilation

"Exploring QCD Dynamics and Proton Structure in Polarized p-p Scattering and e+e- Annihilation" - The discovery of transverse spin effects in e+e- \rightarrow jets in Belle has handed us a unique quark polarimeter that connects microscopic quark spin quantum numbers in high energy collisions with
measurable angular distributions of final state hadrons reconstructed in the detector. The Belle discovery makes it possible, for the first time, to extract the transverse spin distributions of quarks inside the proton from transverse spin observables measured in polarized proton-proton collisions and in lepton-nucleon scattering experiments. The net transverse polarization, the so-called tensor charge, is a fundamental property of the proton and can be compared with ab initio calculations in QCD using lattice techniques. This theoretical effort aims at describing QCD at the nucleon mass scale and will shed light on the dynamics that leads to the creation of most of the visible mass in the Universe... For the full abstract, please see the Physics website. Coffee and cookies will be served before the event in room 130.