Seminars And Colloquia This Week

Neutron star mergers are Nature's ultimate supercolliders, where two massive objects—each containing around 10^58 nucleons—collide at a quarter of the speed of light. These cosmic events offer a unique opportunity to probe the properties of matter under extreme conditions. In this talk, I will discuss our current understanding of the physics of these phenomena and of the way in which their dynamics is imprinted on their gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signals. I will present recent constraints on the properties of dense matter from neutron star merger observations, and I will highlight the potential of next-generation gravitational-wave experiments to provide precision tests of QCD in the nonperturbative regime. Finally, I will talk about theoretical challenges in this field and of our efforts to overcome them.

The discovery in 1983 by the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) that quark distributions in nuclei are modified relative to the free proton and neutron was surprising and had implications for what physicists thought they knew about the role of quarks in the nucleus.  After more than 40 years of intense theoretical and experimental study, there is still no consensus on the origin of this so-called EMC Effect.  However, an exciting program of measurements at Jefferson Lab inspired by recent theoretical predictions and experimental observations provides hope that this long-running question will soon be answered.  In this talk, I will discuss this program and discuss some recent results that will provide important information about the origin of the EMC Effect.