Dr. Axel Schmidt

Axel Schmidt
Title:
Assistant Professor of Physics
Office:
419
Address:
Corcoran Hall
725 21st Street NW
Room 419
Washington, District Of Columbia 20052
United States
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
Personal page

Areas of Expertise

  • Nucleon and Nuclear Structure
  • Short-Range Nucleon Correlations
  • Nuclear "Medium Modification"
  • Proton Form Factors
  • Electron Scattering
  • 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.

GWU Jefferson Lab Group Site

Education

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

B.S. in Physics, Yale University, 2009

Publications

Some of my recent papers (for a complete list, see Inspire):

  • "Many-body factorization and position–momentum equivalence of nuclear short-range correlations," Nature Physics 17, pp. 306–310 (2021)

  • "12C(e,e'pN) measurements of short range correlations in the tensor-to-scalar interaction transition region," Phys. Lett. B 820, 136523 (2021)

  • "Target-normal single spin asymmetries measured with positrons," Eur. Phys. J. A 57, 213 (2021)

  • "Short-range correlations and the nuclear EMC effect in deuterium and helium-3," Phys. Rev. Research 3, 023240 (2021)

  • "Extracting the number of short-range correlated nucleon pairs from inclusive electron scattering data," Phys. Rev. C 103, L031301 (2021)

  • "Generalized contact formalism analysis of the 4He(e,e'pN) reaction," Phys. Lett. B 805 135429 (2020)

  • "Probing Few-Body Nuclear Dynamics via 3H and 3He (e,e'p)pn Cross-Section Measurements," Phys. Rev. Lett. 124 212501 (2020)

  • "Neutron Valence Structure from Nuclear Deep Inelastic Scattering," Phys. Rev. Lett. 124 092002 (2020)

  • "Probing the core of the strong nuclear interaction," Nature, 578 pp. 540-544 (2020)

  • "How much two-photon exchange is needed to resolve the proton form factor discrepancy?" J. Phys. G 47 055109 (2020)

Classes Taught

  • PHYS1021 - University Physics I
  • PHYS2151 - Intermediate Laboratory I
  • PHYS4175 - Nuclear Physics