Prize Recipient

Govind Krishnaswami
University of Rochester

Citation:

"For his achievements as an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester and particularly his research entitled, A Model of Interacting Partons for Hadronic Structure Functions."

Background:

Mr. Krishnaswami did his undergraduate research at the University of Rochester. After spending a summer on the neutrino-nucleon Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) Experiment NuTeV at Fermilab, he worked under Dr. S. G. Rajeev at the U of R, on understanding the structure of the proton as measured in Deep Inelastic Scattering. His undergraduate thesis was on a model of interacting partons for hadronic structure functions. While the scale (Q^2) dependence of structure functions is understood within perturbative QCD, we are just beginning to understand the non-perturbative momentum (x_B) dependence. In the Bjorken limit of DIS, the transverse momenta of partons can be treated perturbatively. The momentum distribution of quarks in the proton can then be estimated by solving a relativistic bound state problem of valence quarks interacting through a linear potential, which arises from eliminating the longitudinally polarized gluons in 1+1 dimensions. This problem was solved within a Hartree approximation and the resulting prediction for the valence quark distribution agreed well with experimental measurements of the neutrino structure function F_3(x_B,Q^2). This work was published in the journal Physics Letters B.

Mr. Krishnaswami is currently a graduate student in physics at the University of Rochester, where he continues to study the proton.