1. RIKEN Lunch Seminar

    "Spin-Orbit Coupling in an Unpolarized Heavy Nucleus"

    Presented by Matt Sievert, BNL

    Thursday, April 2, 2015, 12:30 pm
    Building 510 Room 2-160

    Hosted by: Daniel Pitonyak

    The next-generation Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will make high precision measurements of spin-dependent observables at high energies on nuclear targets. This unique nuclear physics laboratory will bring together access to the multitude of spin-spin and spin-orbit structures which can exist in hadronic targets, and the high color-charge densities which generate the most intense gluon fields permitted by quantum mechanics. The interplay between those two features gives rise to new physical mechanisms which translate these spin-orbit structures into the observed cross-sections, and it makes these mechanisms amenable to first-principles calculation. In this talk, I will discuss the spin-orbit structure of quarks within an unpolarized heavy nucleus in the quasi-classical approximation. The possibility of polarized nucleons with orbital motion inside the unpolarized nucleus generates nontrivial mixing between the spin-orbit structures of the nucleons, and the corresponding structures in the nucleus. This generic feature of a dense quasi-classical system leads to direct predictions testable at an EIC, and in principle allows direct access to the orbital angular momentum in the nucleus.