PROBING THE STANDARD MODEL AND NUCLEON STRUCTURE VIA PARITY VIOLATING ELECTRON SCATTERING

Abstract

Parity-violating electron scattering has developed over the last 25 years into a tool to study both the structure of electroweak interactions and the structure of nucleons. Work on two parity-violation experiments is reported in this thesis. They are the Hall A Proton Parity EXperiment (HAPPEX), which ran at Jefferson Laboratory in 1998-1999, and SLAC E-158, which had its first physics running in 2002. HAPPEX measured the parity-violating asymmetry in elastic e-p scattering at a momentum transfer squared of Q{sup 2} = 0.477 GeV{sup 2} and a scattering angle of 12{sup o}. This asymmetry is sensitive to the presence of strange sea quarks in the proton. In particular, it is sensitive to the proton's strange elastic form factors. An asymmetry of A{sub LR}{sup ep} = -15.05 {+-} 0.98 {+-} 0.56 ppm was measured, where the first error is statistical and the second error is systematic. Combining this asymmetry measurement with existing measurements of the electromagnetic form factors of the proton and neutron allowed HAPPEX to set new constraints on the strange elastic form factors of the proton G{sub E}{sup s} + 0.392G{sub M}{sup s} = 0.025 {+-} 0.020 {+-} 0.014, where G{sub E}{sup s} and G{sub M}{sup s} are the strange electric and magnetic form factors of the proton, respectively. The first error is the quadrature sum of the experimental errors and the second error is due to uncertainty in the electromagnetic form factors. This result is consistent with the absence of a contribution from strange quarks. This thesis reports an analysis of the 1999 data set, with a particular focus on the determination of the raw asymmetry and the corrections to the raw asymmetry to account for helicity-correlated asymmetries in properties of the electron beam.