Speaker
Description
The conventional picture of the proton is based on three “valence” quarks—two “up” and one “down”. This picture has done a remarkable job of describing many properties of the proton. However, thanks to the richness of QCD, the proton is a much more complicated object. In addition to the valence quarks, the proton contains a “sea” of quark-antiquark pairs and gluons that bind the system together. Using the Drell-Yan process, a remarkable asymmetry has been observed in the difference of anti-down to anti-up quarks in the proton. This asymmetry cannot simply be generated through perturbative QCD, but rather indicates an underlying and fundamental antiquark component in the proton. This talk will present the latest results from the SeaQuest experiment on the flavor asymmetry in the proton sea, and compare these results with previous measurements, phenomenological parton distributions fits, and models of the proton.
| speaker affiliation | Argonne National Laboratory |
|---|
