Bassam Aboona

I started my career in physics at Nashville State Community College, where I finished most of my general education studies and took as many math and physics courses that were offered there. I then attended Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), where I received the Honors Transfer Fellowship. After graduating from MTSU in 2018 and receiving my Bachelor of Science in Physics, I started my graduate studies here at Texas A&M University. I received my Master of Science in Physics in 2021, and I am now working toward my PhD in physics with Dr. Carl Gagliardi.

My research interest involves understanding the structure of the proton. For my PhD research, I am focusing on studying the Collins effect in polarized p+Au collisions at center-of-mass energy of 200 GeV, where the proton is transversely. This dataset has been collected by the STAR detector, which is one of the interaction points around the RHIC accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The Collins effect combines the quark transversity patron distribution function (PDF) in the proton with the spin dependent Collins fragmentation function (FF). This effect exhibits itself as an azimuthal modulation of charged hadrons about the jet axis. Transversity is an important PDF to study, since the integral of transversity gives the nucleon tensor charge, and the difference between the helicity and transversity PDF’s is related to the parton orbital angular momentum. Additionally, studying the Collins fragmentation function (FF) provides insights into the factorization and universality of transverse momentum dependent fragmentation functions (TMD’s), which is an area of research that has gained a lot of interest recently because it allows for a more detailed description of the proton.