Date of Award

Summer 2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computational Analysis and Modeling

First Advisor

Steven Wells

Abstract

The Qweak project is seeking to find new physics beyond the Standard Model. It is aimed to measure the weak charge of the proton, which has never been measured, at 4% precision at low momentum transfer. The experiment is performed by scattering electrons from protons and exploiting parity violation in the weak interaction at low four-momentum transfer.

In this experiment, two measurements were considered: which are elastic and inelastic. The elastic is to measure the proton's weak charge. In addition, the inelastic asymmetry measurement, which will extract the low energy constant dΔ. That measurement works in the neutral current sector of the weak interaction.

Qweak measures the asymmetry in the N→ Δ transition. Because the elastic radiative tail gives a dominant contribution to the uncertainty to the N→ Δ asymmetries, this thesis will discuss the radiative correction. In addition, this thesis will describe in details the extensive simulations preformed to determine the impact of all simulated background processes on extracting the PV N→ Δ asymmetries. In the process of verifying the validity of these background fractions, we determined the best value of a quantity measured during the Qweak experiment: the beam normal single spin asymmetry, Bn, in the N→ Δ transition.

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