A New Measurement of the Neutron Electric Form Factor with the Super Bigbite Spectrometer Apparatus
Protons and neutrons, collectively known as nucleons, make up the nuclei at the core of atoms which form our world. The nucleon has been under intensive study for over 100 years, and yet we still do not fully understand the internal dynamics which govern properties like its spin or its mass-which contributes to almost all of the visible mass in the universe. These dynamics are governed by quantum chromodynamics(QCD), the predictions of which are experimentally tested at high energy accelerator facilities such as Jefferson Lab. TheGEN-II experiment (E12-09-016) is one such experiment. GEN-II is part of the Super Bigbite Spectrometer (SBS) experimental form factor pro gramme taking place in Hall A at Jefferson Lab, which aims to make precision measurements of the nucleon electromagnetic form factors(EMFFs)at record high values of squared four momentum transfer ¿2. EMFFs describe the electric and magnetic moment distributions within the nucleon. They can be measured through elastic electron scattering off the nucleon, and describe the recoil response of the target nucleon at a given energy scale. GEN-II is a double polarized semi-exclusive beam target asymmetry (BTA) experiment, seeking to measure the electric form factor of the neutron,¿¿ ¿,at three new values of squared four-momentum transfer¿2 =2.92,6.74and9.82GeV². The latter two points being at record high ¿2. The form factor is determined through measuring the BTA of quasielliptical scattering of a neutron from a polarized nuclear target. The experiment utilized the CEBAF accelerator to produce longitudinally polarized electrons up to ~85% polarization, which were scattered off neutrons within a novel polarized helium-3 (³He) target. This new polarized ³He target was employed by building on the technology of its precursors which existed in similar preceding experiments. This target was designed to operate at the high luminosities typical of Hall A, and reached a record breaking combination of polarization and beam intensity known as figure of merit, three times larger than those predecessors. The SBS collaboration designed and constructed two brand new high acceptance spectrometers for these experiments, an electron arm named Bigbite (BB) and a hadron arm named Super Bigbite. Both spectrometers featured a large acceptance EM dipole magnet, and complementary detector systems. The electron arm contained gaseous electronmultipliers(GEMs) which were used for high precision tracking of the scattered electrons, a heavy gas cherenkov (GRINCH) which was used for PID between electrons and pions, a plastic i ii scintillator timing hodoscope to provide high resolution timing of the start of events, and a pair of EM calorimeters (BBCal) which provided energy measurements of detected particles, and provided the experimental trigger. The hadron arm also contained a system of GEMs which will be utilized for future SBS experiments, and a hadron calorimeter designed to provide position, timing and energy measurements of the recoiling nucleon. The calibration of all detector subsystems, beam and target data is discussed, with a focus on novel timing calibrations to the hodoscope and hadron calorimeter. An analysis of selecting quasielliptical events and suppressing background contributions from a number of sources which contaminate the final event sample is given. The largest irreducible backgrounds are found to be from misidentified protons, timing accidentals and inelastic events. The physical asymmetry is measured and used to extract a value for the form factor ratio ¿¿ ¿/¿¿ ¿. High precision ¿2 data for ¿¿ ¿ is used to then extract ¿¿ ¿. This work finds at ¿2 = 2.92 GeV2 that ¿¿ ¿ = 0.0129+0.0019 -0.0020. This result is in statistical agreement with existing fits to world data, and predictions from the constituent quark model and Dyson–Schwinger equations, in this region of ¿2.