Professor Alarcon standing in front of the BLAST detector.
Ricardo Alarcon
Title:
Professor
Professor Alarcon’s research interests are the design, construction, and execution of experiments in basic nuclear science. He has carried out experiments designed to study the spin dependent electromagnetic response of few-body nuclei at the NIKHEF facility in the Netherlands and at the MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator Center. His present research activities are centered on experiments addressing fundamental issues of nuclear physics: the measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in the capture of polarized neutrons by protons to determine the strength of the hadronic weak interaction; a precision measurement of the radiative decay of the neutron with the goal of improving the precision of quantities associated with the neutron decay; the measurement of electron and positron elastic scattering from hydrogen to determine the contribution of multiple-photon exchange in elastic lepton-nucleon scattering and address the present puzzle of the proton form factor ratio; and a search for the neutron electric dipole moment which possible existence is of fundamental interest and would significantly challenge the theoretical extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiments are taking place at the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, at the NIST facility, and at the DESY facility in Germany. He is also involved in the design and construction of a new kind of spectrometer for more precise measurements of neutron decay parameters to test the Standard Model.
Home Dept:
Department of Physics
Home Dept URL:
Other Affiliations:
Associate Chair
Category:
Faculty
Degree Info:
Ph.D., Ohio University
Area of Study:
Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics; Cold Neutrons and Electron Scattering.
CV:
Phone:
(480) 965-8549
Selected Publications
.
2012 .
The implementation of a super mirror polarizer at the SNS fundamental neutron physics beamline .
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A .
671 .
137-143
.
2011 .
Precise Measurement of Deuteron Tensor Analyzing Powers with BLAST .
Physical Review Letters .
107 .
252501
.
2011 .
Spin-dependent Electron Scattering from Polarized Protons and Deuterons with the BLAST Experiment at MIT-Bates .
Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science .
61 .
409-434
.
2011 .
Measurements of the generalized electric and magnetic polarizabilities of the proton at low Q(2) using the virtual Compton scattering reaction .
Physical Review C .
84 .
035206
.
2010 .
Measurement of parity-violating gamma-ray asymmetry in the capture of polarized cold neutrons on protons .
Physical Review C .
83 .
015505
.
2008 .
Charge Form Factor of the Neutron at Low Momentum Transfer from the 2H(e,en)1H Reaction .
Physical Review Letters .
101 .
042501
.
2005 .
Investigation of the Conjectured Nucleon Deformation at Low Momentum Transfer .
Phys. Rev. Lett. .
94 .
022003
.
2004 .
Electron Scattering from Few-Body Nuclei .
Quarks, Hadrons, and Nuclei .
Singapore: World Scientific .
3-42
.
2002 .
Spin-Momentum Correlations in Quasielastic Electron Scattering from Deuterium .
Phys. Rev. Lett. .
88 .
102302
Research Interests
The interior of one the Cerenkov detectors built by the ASU group. Relativistic particles generate Cerenkov radiation as they transverse the aerogel at speeds faster than light in that medium.
