I am interested in studying the subatomic structure of strongly interacting particles, hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, the constituents of every atomic nucleus. This research is carried out at Jefferson Laboratory (JLab), Newport News, VA, as well as Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, IL. My group is leading the preparation of a few upcoming 12 GeV CLAS (CLAS12, housed in Hall-B at JLab) experiments to unravel the Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD) confinement feature of hadrons in terms of their elementary constituents, quarks and gluons, via the study of the hadronization and/or fragmentation processes that probe the dynamics of quark (or Color) Propagation and hadron formation in the cold nuclear matter (CP experiment), and the Color Transparency phenomenon; that is, the formation and evolution of small size configurations to regular hadrons (CT experiment), which collected data in the fall of 2023, as well as deciphering the effect of in-medium modifications of the transverse momentum distributions (TMDs) in nuclei (Nuclear TMDs in CLAS12 experiment). The group is also leading the artificial intelligence (AI) track reconstruction and particle identification for the comprehensive Low Energy Radial Tracker (ALERT) studies on light nuclei (4He and 2H nuclei) to investigate the partonic structure with Generalized Parton Distributions via (in-)coherent production and exploit the spectator tagging technique to explore several processes such as deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS), DVMP (deeply virtual meson production), and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS).
Furthermore, the group has been involved in several JLab 6 GeV data analyses that aimed to study the DVCS off 4He in addition to the meson spectroscopy in the 4He coherent production (EG6 run-group experiment "internal wiki-page"), extract a high precision nucleon spin structure at very low momentum transfer to test various spin sum rules (EG4 run-group experiment "internal wiki-page"), and probe the time evolution of elementary configurations of the hadron wave function via the hadronization study of Λ hyperons, the first-ever SIDIS analysis with CLAS6 EG2 datasets; the EG2 run-group married two experiments, CT and CP. The latter provides a promising method to investigate nucleon and nuclear structure, construct a theory of super-dense nuclear matter, and disentangle the physics of heavy ion collisions that take place at high temperatures with the creation of a Quark-Gluon Plasma. The published results of SIDIS Λ electroproduction off nuclei in the forward and backward fragmentation regions will be further enriched once the 11 GeV CLAS12 CP experiment accumulates data in the spring of 2024. Besides the physics interest, my group successfully led the development as well as optimization of the CLAS12 drift chambers calibration and monitoring suite.

On the other hand, my Fermilab research focuses on the polarized, E1039, and unpolarized, E906, Drell-Yan (DY) experiments, dubbed as SpinQuest and SeaQuest, respectively. The former intends to extract spin-dependent quark and antiquark distributions of the proton and neutron and study the unique correlation of the quark-antiquark spin and angular momenta. In this project, my group is leading the effort of studying the poorly known gluon Sivers/Twist-3 transverse momentum distributions using J/Ψ production as well as the transverse polarization, or transversity, distribution, developing an advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) based multi-threaded framework that will allow an efficient parallelization of the online data analysis, maintaining the performance of two-station tracking chambers in the inherited SeaQuest spectrometer, and providing support to operating, maintaining, and servicing the cryogenic and polarized targets during the commissioning and data-taking of the SpinQuest experiment. While the latter aims to extract a more precise antiquark asymmetry ratio, study the quark propagation and energy loss effects in the cold nuclear matter, target nucleus, before the hard process, dilepton production, takes place, in addition to the measurement of DY cross sections from several nuclear targets to compare the sea quark distribution in nuclei to that in deuteron. This comparison will allow an examination of the previously published DY results, which showed no significant modification of the nuclear cross section for longitudinal momentum fraction, x > 0.1, unlike the "antishadowing" enhancement observed in the deep inelastic scattering and EMC experiments. The SeaQuest data will be able to address the question of whether the antishadowing region and the so-called European Muon Collaboration (EMC) effect (depletion seen for x ~ 0.5) exist in the Drell-Yan process.