Date of Award

Winter 2009

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

Committee Director

Sebastian Kuhn

Committee Member

John Adam

Committee Member

Gail Dodge

Committee Member

Rocco Schiavilla

Committee Member

Leposava Vuskovic

Abstract

We know much less about the neutron than the proton due to the absence of free neutron targets. Neutron information has to be extracted from data on nuclear targets like deuterium. This requires corrections for off-shell and binding effects which are not known from first principles and therefore are model-dependent. As a consequence, the same data can be interpreted in different ways, leading to different conclusions about important questions such as the value of the d/u quark ratio at large momentum fraction x. The Barely Off-shell NUcleon Structure (BONUS) experiment at Jefferson Lab addressed this problem by tagging spectator protons in coincidence with inelastic electron scattering from deuterium. A novel compact radial time projection chamber was built to detect low-momentum, backward moving protons, ensuring that the scattering took place on a loosely bound neutron. The scattered electron was detected with Jefferson Lab's CLAS spectrometer. Data were taken at beam energies of 2, 4 and 5 GeV. Results on the extracted structure function [special characters omitted] of the neutron, both in the resonance and deep inelastic regions are presented. Dependence of the results on the spectator kinematics, angle and momentum, is investigated. In addition, tests of the spectator model for different angles and momenta are performed.

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DOI

10.25777/6138-af14

ISBN

9781109706024

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Nuclear Commons

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