Date of Award

Spring 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

Committee Director

Raúl Briceño

Committee Member

Ted Rogers

Committee Member

Lawrence Weinstein

Committee Member

Balša Terzić

Committee Member

Linda Vahala

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges facing modern day nuclear physics is understanding the structure of states within the hadronic spectrum of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We have shown this spectrum to be quite rich with hundreds of allowed states; however, if we wish to better grasp the dynamics of QCD, then it is necessary that we start investigating the internal structure of these states. This may be done by probing these states with external currents, but this requires a description of the intersection of QCD with the electroweak sector. This work acts as a stepping stone in this direction. Working to all orders in the strong interaction and to leading order in electroweak effects we present novel formalisms for transition amplitudes with one and two currents with two hadrons in the final state, namely the 2 + J → 2 and 1 + J → 2 + J amplitudes. Our results are valid for spinless hadrons with any number of open channels between two- and three-particle threshold, place no restrictions on the Lorentz structure or quantum numbers of the current, and are independent of any underlying model. We also show how this formalism may be used to rigorously access elastic form factors of resonances which has proven challenging to do experimentally. Finally, we present a toy calculation of elastic resonance form factors using the 2 + J → 2 formalism in which we stress the importance of treating resonances rigorously as poles in the complex plane.

Rights

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DOI

10.25777/nyqy-6922

ISBN

9798382772752

ORCID

0000-0003-0090-8636

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