"Physics in the Mirror World: Using Parity Violation to Study Quarks in the Proton"

Prof.  David Armstrong

College of William and Mary

Abstract

   Nature is left handed - due to the weak interaction, the interactions of
   particles are different when viewed in a mirror, i.e. under the parity
   transformation. This remarkable property provides nuclear physicists with a
   unique tool to study the quark substructure of protons and neutrons, in
   particular to learn how the fleeting existence of strange quarks contribute
   to the way that charge and magnetization are distributed in the nucleon.
   These parity-violation experiments at Jefferson Lab and elsewhere are reviewed.