Nucleons (that is, protons and neutrons) are the building blocks of all ordinary matter, and the study of nucleon structure is a critical part of frontier research to unveil the mysteries of the universe and our existence. Gluons and quarks are the underlying degrees of freedom that explain the properties of nucleons, and fully understanding how they contribute to the properties of nucleons (such as mass or spin structure) helps to decode the last part of the Standard Model that rules our physical world. After more than half a century of large-scale experimental efforts, there are still many unknowns concerning the theory quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the branch of the Standard Model describing how gluons strongly interact with themselves and with quarks, binding both nucleons and nuclei. Using supercomputers and a theoretical tool called "lattice QCD", we can simulate the theory that dominates the universe at the femtoscale and unveil its diverse phenomenology, including some properties that are hard to determine in experiments. Few selected recent Lattice-QCD examples and their impacts will be briefly discussed.

Biography

Huey-Wen Lin is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in New York City. She was a research professor at University of Washington from 2009 to 2014 and a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley from 2015 to 2016. Her research uses high-performance computing to study the partonic properties of nucleons and other hadrons according to the Standard Model with applications to high-energy and nuclear physics. She was elected to serve on the executive committee for USQCD from 2020 to 2023 and American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics from 2022 to 2024; she was convener of the Snowmass Energy-Frontier topical group and chaired multiple APS committees, including the Herman Feshbach Award Committee, and organized many conferences and workshops. She designed the free mobile game “Quantum 3”, which teaches QCD concepts at a K-12 level, and co-created and managed the “My Journey as a Physicist” Podcast. She was an APS Blewett Fellow in 2015, an NSF Career awardee in 2017, and received the Cottrell Scholar Award in 2020, MSU's Excellence in DEI University award in 2023. She became an APS fellow in 2022 and is currently co-spokesperson for the CTEQ collaboration. 

Inviter

Yi-Bo Yang