Elucidating Strangeness with electromagnetic probes

Asli Acar's PhD project is based on a Thomas Jefferson National laboratory "VeryStrange" proposal (UoY spokespersons Zachariou, Watts; ~150 scientists on the proposal) aimed to establish the spectrum of nucleon resonances containing two strange quarks (cascades) including their quantum numbers and decay branches. In a view of multiple recent exotic particles discoveries, exploration of cascade spectra become extremely important since it allows to link heavy quark systems with non-relativistic quarks to light quark systems with ultrarelativistic quarks, benchmarking the theory of strong interactions, Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD), in the intermediate regime.

A cascade baryons with two strange quark combined in a di-quark system are expected to behave very similar to a heavy-light mesons. Asli's analysis will verify the validity of this hypothesis. We expect her work to be realized as a very high impact paper.

Asli will analyze CLAS-12 data collected in 2019-2022 which meanwhile got fully calibrated and cooked.

Some part of her project will be concentrated on simulation of various reactions in CLAS-12 environment and theoretical data processing with the elements of AI.