Our celebration of Dr. Wyatt Smith's successful doctoral dissertation defense, with his supervisor, Dr. Adam Szczepaniak.
Dissertation Title: Studies in Hadron Spectroscopy: Amplitude Analysis, Regge Physics and Lattice QCD
Abstract: Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is widely considered as the correct theory of strongly interacting particles, although no complete method of extracting the hadron spectrum from QCD is known. The constituent quark model performs reasonably well for description of the hadron spectrum, though in the last few decades numerous exotic hadrons, hadrons with quantum numbers which are forbidden by the quark model, have been discovered. To learn about these exotic states, and about confinement, we apply a broad range of techniques:
First, we discuss the resolution of partial wave ambiguities in linearly polarized photoproduction of double spinless mesons in support of experimental measurements of exotics. Second, we study double-Regge processes in the context of two to three particle scattering. We model reggeon-reggeon-meson vertices using string-breaking matrix elements arising from the vacuum production of a quark-antiquark pair. We also study the generation of quark Regge trajectories from the re-summation of ladder diagrams in indirect kinematical channels. Finally, we employ gauge-fixed Lattice QCD to study phenomenological explanations for confinement in the Coulomb gauge. We perform precise simulations of the relevant states and propose an alternative method for extracting the confining Coulomb string tension.
