With PCs and other computing paraphernalia taking up most of the space in their luggage, they arrived the 11th of June. The three women make up the Andrews Group of the AmZEUS consortium of American universities working in the ZEUS collaboration. ZEUS is one of two major detectors of HERA, the world's only electron-proton collider ring. In HERA, 27.5GeV electrons collide with 820GeV protons. The driving motivation for the collaboration has been to determine the structure of the proton, which is as yet poorly understood beyond its collective and nominal partonic features.
Electrons make excellent probes down to very small scales because of their point-like properties.
ZEUS has already made significant discoveries with respect to the proton structure function and diffractive events. In very forward jets, shape anomalies have been found and been tentatively attributed to multiple collisions in the underlying interaction mechanism. These forward jets can be more closely studied by working with a sample of data for which the colliding beams were tuned to shift the interaction point in order to enhance the resolution of small angle data with the existing detector. Tiffany will be doing much of the programming for the analysis and will be basing her Interdisciplinary Honors Seminar presentation on its results while Claudine will be doing the running of the programs as well as general office management and support. In addition to their involvement in direct research activities, they will also participate in pedagogical student seminars at DESY led by former ZEUS spokesman Robert Klanner of Hamburg University.