Our celebration of Dr. Daniel Gallimore's successful doctoral dissertation defense, with his supervisor, Dr. Jinfeng Liao.
Dissertation Title: Potential Model Investigations of Hadron Structure
Abstract: While a full description of hadrons requires a robust relativistic quantum field theory incorporating both quark and gluon degrees of freedom, the constituent quark model still holds a surprising amount of descriptive power. This thesis explores the utility of quark potential models in hadron structure research in three ways: calculating the proton mass radius, initializing the nucleon profile in heavy ion collisions, and generating the charmonium mass spectrum on a quantum computer. In the first of these, we generalize a 2-body strong force effective potential, known as the Cornell potential, to 3-body systems and compute the proton charge and mass radii. We discuss the differences between the proton charge and mass distributions and the influence of nonperturbative factors. Next, we use the mass profiles derived from our potential models to simulate the initial conditions of heavy ion collisions. We compute the eccentricities ε2 and ε3 and investigate their sensitivity to the nucleon profile. Finally, we measure the spectrum of charmonium on a quantum computer using a Cornell potential model and variational algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using zero noise extrapolation to mitigate errors due to noise and address its challenges. Additionally, we discuss a method of approximating excited states by orthogonalizing with respect to the ground state and establish bounds on the error.
