Speaker
Description
Central goals of nuclear physics are to understand the spatial structure of the proton, as well as the mechanisms that generate its mass and spin distributions, emerging from quark and gluon interactions via the strong force in QCD. Vast resources have been committed to experimental facilities - foremost the upgraded 12 GeV Jefferson Lab accelerator and the planned Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) that have been paralleled, more recently, by a remarkable shift in federal science and technology investments in AI. I will discuss how AI-based approaches allow us to solve the complex problem of determining spatial structure at the femtoscale, illustrating, with a practical application to deeply virtual exclusive scattering, how this can bring about breakthroughs that were once thought impossible. Explainable AI approaches are producing new avenues in theoretical physics while generating innovative ideas across fields.
