Thursday, February 5, 2026
4:00 pm-5:00 pm
First principles' pictures of the proton
Protons and neutrons comprise 95% of the mass of visible universe, but many of their properties are still poorly understood. The direct calculation of the internal structure of protons and neutrons is a long-standing goal for nuclear physics, in part because a refined understanding of their structure is important to interpreting data at hadron colliders. First principles' determinations of proton structure have recently become possible, using new developments in lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the numerical solution of the strong nuclear force. I will introduce these approaches and review the Hadstruc Collaboration's on-going efforts to extract the quark and gluon structure of protons and neutrons via the reduced pseudo-distribution framework, connecting our work to broader efforts to unravel proton structure.
