Arts & Sciences Events
[PAST EVENT] Amy Marie Schertz: Physics Dissertation Defense
Amy Marie Schertz , Final Oral Examination for the Ph.D. Degree, Title: "Partial Wave Analysis of the ??^- Final State Photoproduced at GlueX"
Abstract: The meson has traditionally been understood as the bound state of a quark and an antiquark, but there is experimental evidence for exotic meson states, which have properties that cannot be produced by this quark-antiquark model. One candidate for such exotic systems is the hybrid meson, predicted by lattice QCD, which includes gluonic excitation in its wavefunction. One of the prominent decay modes of the lightest predicted exotic hybrid is expected to be b_1 ?. This dissertation presents an analysis of the ?p???^- ?^(++) channel produced at the GlueX experiment, in the mass range where the b_1 (1235) meson is prominent. An amplitude analysis is performed on the decay of the ??^- system, in order to extract the resonance parameters of the b_1, as well as analyze the resonant and non-resonant background.
Bio: Amy grew up in Aloha, Oregon, where she began her academic career at Portland Community College. She studied there until she realized that physics was her passion and transferred to the University of Puget Sound, where she earned her B.S. in Physics with a minor in Mathematics. She enrolled in graduate school at W&M in 2015 and joined the GlueX collaboration under the supervision of Prof. Justin Stevens in 2017. After graduation, she will join the LHCb group at ELTE in Budapest, Hungary, where she will lead the ELTE group's effort in angular analysis of ?_b?pKl^+ l^- decays.