IMSA-SIR Navigating the Sea-quark Content of the Proton

Internship Description

Summary/Background

Parton distribution functions (PDFs) describe how a proton's momentum is shared among its quarks and gluons, and they enter nearly every theoretical prediction for the Large Hadron Collider. They cannot be measured directly: they are inferred from measured cross sections by solving an inverse problem, in which a flexible parametrization is adjusted until QCD predictions match data from many experiments at once. The strange-quark content of the proton remains one of the least constrained pieces of this picture. The student will carry out a first such global fit using the open-source xFitter framework, working with a PhD student and a staff collaborator, and will explore which measurements constrain strangeness and how the resulting uncertainties behave, with a possible extension to Drell-Yan lepton-pair production using DYTurbo.

Education and Experience Requirements

Required Skills:

Comfort at a Linux command line and working knowledge of Python (NumPy and Matplotlib) are valuable; some prior use of QCD code such as DYTurbo is ideal preparation. Calculus and basic probability are sufficient to follow how a chi-squared fit and its uncertainties work. No deep prior knowledge of QCD or quantum field theory is expected.
 

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