Dr. Axel Schmidt

Areas of Expertise

• Nucleon and Nuclear Structure
• Short-Range Nucleon Correlations
• Proton Form Factors
• Electron Scattering
• Magnetic Spectrometetry
• Neutron Detection

Current Research

I'm interested in understanding how the strong nuclear force determines the structure of protons, neutrons, and atomic nuclei. My favorite to technique is to use high-energy electron scattering on fixed nuclear targets. I frequently conduct experiments at the electron accelerator at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, VA and I help build large particle detectors to measure the momenta of particles emerging from collisions. My latest project was a "Backward Angle Neutron Detector" (BAND), which is currently measuring the time-of-flight of neutrons emerging from deep inelastic scattering collisions on deuterium. Through the CLAS Collaboration, I'm preparing for an upcoming run that will use a wide range of nuclear targets to answer questions about multi-nucleon correlations, short-distance nuclear forces, and the effect of the nuclear medium of quark momentum distributions.

Education

Ph.D. in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016

B.S. in Physics, Yale University, 2009

Publications

Some of my best recent papers (A complete list can be found on Inspire):

"Probing the core of the strong nuclear interaction," Nature, in press (2020)

"Direct Observation of Proton-Neutron Short-Range Correlation Dominance in Heavy Nuclei" Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 172502 (2019)

"Modified structure of protons and neutrons in correlated pairs" Nature 566, 354-358, Feb. 2019

"Comparing Momentum Distributions in A=2 and 3 nuclei using 2H, 3H, and 3H(e,e'p) measurements" Phys. Lett. B 797, 134890 (2019)

"Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering: Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment" Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 092501 (2017)

Classes Taught

University Physics I (Phys1021)