Daniël Boer's Physics Webpage

Topic 1: Gluon distributions at LHC and EIC

Description & objectives:

Gluons are the force carriers of the strong interaction, which is one of the four fundamental forces of Nature. The microscopic theory of the strong interaction is the quantum theory of quarks and gluons, called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Gluons are confined inside protons and this makes the study of their properties difficult. Only in high energy scattering processes those properties become apparent. The momentum distribution of gluons inside protons is quite well known experimentally, but there are many other distributions that capture additional properties of the gluons inside protons, such as the polarization states of the gluons, but also the spatial distribution of gluons and the correlations between the polarization and the position and momentum. In this way one is dealing with many types of higher dimensional distributions, such as gluon Transverse Momentum Distributions (TMDs), Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs), Generalized TMDs (GTMDs), Double distributions and diffractive distributions. There are ample opportunities to study such gluon distributions in the proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and in electron-proton collisions at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) to be constructed at BNL (Long Island, NY). Most of these studies are complementary and the combined information is key to getting a more complete picture of the gluonic properties of protons and nuclei. With such distributions one can address questions about the gluonic/mass radius of the proton or the pressure distribution of the proton.

One specific objective I have is to fully exploit the synergies between the experiments at LHC and EIC and to investigate whether a common gluonic description of completely different classes of processes (exclusive, diffractive, and semi-inclusive) can be obtained. Until very recently these processes were studied by separate communities and topics of discussion at separate conferences, but now we start to uncover the aspects that they have in common and relate results that were always thought to be unconnected.

Selected scientific highlights:

Funding:

Part of the research on this topic has been financially supported by the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education LPDP and the Dutch funding agency FOM (now part of NWO).