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[PAST EVENT] Archana Radhakrishnan: Physics Dissertation Defense
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Archana Radhakrishnan, Final Oral Examination for the Ph.D. Degree, Title: "Radiative Width of K^* (892) from Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics"
Abstract: The quarks and gluons in QCD are strongly coupled at the hadronic scale, making standard perturbative techniques used to study electroweak interactions ineffective. In this work, Lattice QCD (LQCD) is used to study QCD theoretically. LQCD considers the quark and gluon fields of QCD on a space-time grid of finite volume, solving the relevant equations by sampling possible field configurations. This novel calculation uses LQCD to explore the radiative transition K??K? by applying techniques developed in the past decade. The resonant K^* (892) radiative width, which appears in the P-wave of the transition amplitude, is calculated. The matrix elements are extracted from three-point functions on a finite-volume discretized lattice with a pion mass of 284 MeV. The finite-volume amplitudes, constrained over a large number of K? energy-points and four-momentum transfers, are mapped to the infinite volume transition amplitude using the Lellouch-Lüscher formalism. The radiative width is determined by analytically continuing the amplitude into the complex plane and calculating the residue at the K^* pole. The results show reasonable agreement with experimental values.
Bio: Archana was born and raised in India. In 2015 she graduated from National Institute of Technology with a B.Tech in Engineering Physics. She joined William & Mary in the fall of 2015 to pursue a Ph.D. She started working with Jo Dudek and the Jefferson Lab’s lattice group in 2017 to conduct research on the radiative transition of mesons. After graduation, she will be joining the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai as a postdoctoral scholar.