Brian Quinn
Associate ProfessorPh.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email: bquinn@cmu.edu
Phone: 1-412-268-3523
FAX: 1-412-681-0648
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Brian QuinnAssociate ProfessorPh.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology Email: bquinn@cmu.edu
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Medium energy physics generally concentrates on the middle ground between conventional nuclear physics and high energy particle physics, although the boundaries are not sharply defined. The Carnegie Mellon medium energy group has participated in a rich variety of experiments over the past few years, using anti-protons to study annihilation on protons with the resulting creation of strange (and anti-strange) quarks; kaons and pions to create hypernuclei, allowing us to study their weak decay lifetimes and branching modes; and ultra-relativistic heavy ions to investigate the properties of nuclear matter at extremes of density. We have contributed to many aspects of these experiments: detectors, data-acquisition hardware, on-line acquisition programs and analysis. Carnegie Mellon graduate students have taken a leading role in the analysis and interpretation of the data from many of these experiments. One recent focus of our work has been a series of experiments in which our group led an international collaboration in an attempt to investigate the existence of a six-quark object, called the H-dibaryon, predicted by the MIT bag model. The apparatus built for that experiment has also opened the door for a series of other experiments involving strangeness in nuclei.
I will be working on these and other experiments addressing interesting problems in medium energy physics. A high-current continuous beam superconducting electron accelerator facility, CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility), has recently been built at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jlab) in Virginia. I have been leading our group's involvement in an experiment which will use the CEBAF beam to study the weak form-factors of the proton as a means to provide new information on the strangeness content of the nucleon. We have developed a series of high-speed custom electronics boards to make this challenging experiment possible. Over the next year we will be installing the electronics at CEBAF, and working on data acquisition and analysis. Another CEBAF experiment which I am leading will search for the small component of the deuteron's wavefunction in which the two baryons are briefly excited to virtual Delta resonances.
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and 
Close to
Threshold", Physics Letters B 402: 227 (1997).
Barnes, P.D., et al., "Observables in High Statistics Measurements of
the Reaction 
",
Phys. Rev. C: 1877 (1996).
Barnes, P.D., et al., "Measurement of
and 
at 1.726
and 1.771 GeV/c", Phys. Rev. C 54: 2831 (1996).
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Rusek, A., et al., "Search for Strangelets in Relativistic Si + Pt and Au + Pt collisions", To be published in Phys. Rev. C (1996).
Rusek, A., et al., "Search for H dibaryon-Nucleus Bound States in Relativistic Au + Pt collisions", Phys. Rev. C52: 1580 (1995).
Barnes, P.D., et al., "Study of the Reaction Anti-proton+Proton to Anti-lambda+Lambda below 6 MeV Excess Energy", Phys. Lett. 331B: 203 (1994).
Saito, N., et al., "Composite Particle Production in Relativistic Au + Pt, Si +Pt, and p + Pt Collisions", Phys. Rev C49: 3211 (1994).
Retzlaff, G.A., et al., "Threshold Electrodisintegration in the A=3 System", Phys. Rev. C49: 1263 (1994).
Diebold, G.E., et al., "Production of Pi+, Pi-, K+, K-, Protons, and Anti-protons in relativistic Au + Pt, Si + Pt and p + Pt collisions", Phys. Rev. C48: 2984 (1993).
Barnes, P.D., et al., "Measurement of the Reaction: Anti-proton+Proton to K-short+K-short in the Region Near Sqrt(s)=2230 MeV", Phys. Lett. B309: 469 (1993).