Research Interests:

Professor Liuti´s research involves theoretical studies of the quark and gluon structure of hadrons - the strongly interacting particles. This is unraveled most accurately using electroweak probes, such as in lepton-proton scattering experiments. When the four-momentum transfer in these reactions is large, or the distances probed in the proton are small, perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) describes the strong interactions among quarks and gluons in virtue of the theory´s property of "asymptotic freedom". Although much has been learned on this topic since the initial formulation of QCD, many fascinating problems still need to be explained that deal with the large distance regime where pQCD methods no longer apply. Professor Liuti is currently studying phenomenological methods to monitor the transition between the perturbative and non-perturbative regimes of QCD. This involves finding correlations among a vast number of phenomena in hadronic physics, such as proton resonance production and the phenomenon of parton-hadron duality in both polarized and unpolarized scattering, the quark and gluon structure of nuclei including generalized parton distributions, semi-inclusive reactions, comparative analyses of neutrino and electron scattering. These are common goals with the experimental programs at Jefferson Lab, HERA, RHIC, and Professor Liuti is pursuing actively the establishment of a stronger collaboration between theorists and experimentalists.

Current and Recent Courses:

PHYS 7420: Electricity and Magnetism I (Lecturer) Fall

PHYS 8710: Nuclear Physics (Lecturer) Spring

Simonetta Liuti’s Personal Home Page.