QCD Spin Physics: A Symposium to Honor Jacques Soffer

Wednesday 10 Apr 2019, 09:00 → 20:30 US/Eastern

Physics Department, Bldg. 510, Large Seminar Room (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

RIKEN BNL Research Center Workshop

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Our long-time colleague Jacques Soffer passed away recently. Jacques was a tireless supporter and advocate of the RHIC spin program from its very beginnings, and his abiding interest in polarization phenomena in high-energy scattering goes back even much longer. Jacques has made numerous seminal contributions to the program that range from deep theoretical insights into nucleon spin structure all the way to phenomenological predictions for polarized pp collider physics that guided the RHIC experiments.

He was among the first to point out the outstanding opportunities that the violation of parity in nature provides for probing nucleon spin structure at RHIC. His work on the "positivity" of parton distributions has become a milestone for the field and today is regarded as a foundation of our understanding of nucleon structure. Jacques also made invaluable predictions for pp elastic scattering at RHIC, which have shaped the way we do polarimetry at RHIC.

Much of what has come to fruition at RHIC in its nearly two decades of running is associated with Jacques's contributions. We feel that it is timely to remember, commemorate, and honor his pioneering role in making spin physics at RHIC a reality. We think that this is done most appropriately by a scientific symposium. The symposium will assess the impact of RHIC spin on our understanding of the spin structure of the proton, highlighting Jacques's contributions. It will also address how the achievements at RHIC spin set the basis for a future electron-ion collider.

Event ID: 40796

1 Registration

Sesion Chair: Hideto En'yo

2 Jacques Soffer: the man with a passion for discovery

Speaker: Naohito Saito (J-PARC/KEK)

3 Welcome

Speaker: Robert Tribble (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

4 Collaborating with Jacques Soffer

Speaker: Ivan Schmidt (Federico Santa Maria Technical University)

11:00 Coffee

Session Chair: Robert Jaffe

5 A spin on swift protons

Speaker: Nigel Buttimore (Trinity College Dublin)

6 The statistical model for parton structure: a review

Speaker: Franco Buccella (INFN Naples)

7 Constraints on spin observables

Speaker: Jean-Marc Richard (IN2P3 & University of Lyon)

8 Comments about Jacques Soffer

Speaker: Elliot Leader (Imperial College London)

13:15 Lunch

Session Chair: Yuji Goto

9 Snakes and rotators

Speaker: Waldo Mackay

10 Polarized beam operations

Speaker: Mei Bai (GSI)

11 The long road to RHIC polarimetry

Speaker: Yousef Makdisi

16:00 Group Photo / Coffee

Session Chair: Mike Tannenbaum

12 Spin-dependent parton distributions - then & now

Speaker: Werner Vogelsang (Tuebingen)

13 Probing sea quarks via weak boson production in polarized proton collisions

Speaker: Sanghwa Park (Stony Brook University)

14 RHIC's unpolarized W/Z program

Speaker: Matt Posik (Temple University)

15 Thanks from the Soffer Family

Speaker: Danielle Soffer

18:30 Reception