Postdoctoral Research Associate studying glueballs at GlueX

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at The College of William & Mary studying the strong force through the GlueX collaboration. GlueX is a multinational collaboration located in Hall D at Jefferson Lab which collides high-energy photons with a proton target.

My current work consists of a study of $K_SK_S$ (pairs of K-short mesons) photoproduction. This gives us access to even-spin $f$ and $a$ mesons (light, flavorless particles with isospin $0$ and $1$ respectively), the former of which are interesting for several reasons. First, they share many of the same quantum numbers, the values we use to classify particles, with glueballs, hypothetical particles that contain only gluons, the force-carrier of the strong interaction. The lightest of these glueballs is predicted to look nearly identical to some of the $f_0$ mesons (spin-$0$ $f$ mesons), and it turns out that there are too many of these $f_0$ mesons seen in experiments for them to all be compatible with the quark model.

Read more about my research.