Date of Award

Winter 2022

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

Physics

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

Elena Long

Second Advisor

Elena Long

Third Advisor

John Arrington

Abstract

The primary aim of my work is the extraction of the elastic cross-sections from data collected in Jefferson Lab Hall A experiment E12-11-112, which measured inclusive elastic scattering from the mirror nuclei 3He and 3H at low momentum transfer. I determined the ratio of the 3He and 3H cross-sections since it cancels many of the systematic uncertainties that enter the absolute cross-section extraction, and it reduced fractional uncertainty to 1.85%. By going to low energy and forward angle, the effect of the magnetic form factor Fm(Q2) can be minimized, which allows for an extraction of the charge form factor Fch(Q2) without having to do a Rosenbluth-type experiment. The RMS charge radius of the nucleus is proportional to the slope, dFch/dQ2 as Q2 → 0, so by measuring the electric form factor of a target at low Q2, we can extrapolate and extract the nucleus charge radius. A preliminary sensitivity study shows that the inclusion of this measurement in fits to worlds data reduces the normalization uncertainty of existing data sets by 30-50%.

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