Photoproduction of the Λ(1520) hyperon with a 9 GeV photon beam at GlueX

The GlueX experiment is located at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, VA, USA. It features a hermetic 4π detector with excellent tracking and calorimetry capabilities. Its 9 GeV linearly polarized photon beam is produced from the 12 GeV electron beam, delivered by JLab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), via bremsstrahlung on a thin diamond and is incident on a LH2 target. GlueX recently finished its first data taking period and published first results. The main goal of GlueX is to measure gluonic excitations of mesons. These so-called hybrid or exotic mesons are predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) but haven’t been experimentally confirmed yet. They can have quantum numbers not accessible by ordinary quark-antiquark pairs which helps in identifying them using partial wave analysis techniques. The search for exotic mesons requires a very good understanding of photoproduction processes in a wide range of final states, one of them being pK + K − which contains many meson and baryon reactions. The Λ(1520) is a prominent hyperon resonance in this final state and is the subject of this presentation. This talk will give an introduction to the GlueX experiment and show preliminary results for the photoproduction of the Λ(1520) hyperon. The measurement of important observables like the photon beam asymmetry and spin-density matrix elements will be discussed and an outlook to possible measurements of further hyperon states in the pK + K − final state will be given.

Ella Fitzgerald

Sam Waymon, the brother of Nina Simone, once stated, “Music can save you by giving [you] a sense of vision, tolerance, [and] harmony; it can give you . . . a fullness.” Waymon’s words reflect heavily in the life of Ella Fitzgerald. With her life beginning in poverty, music saved Ella. Writers and musicians alike commemorate Ella Fitzgerald in 2019 with books and albums dedicated in her honor. In her recent album devoted wholly to the swinging sounds of the Queen of Jazz, renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter pays musical homage and describes Ella Fitzgerald’s voice as a “voice that was able to bring people together.” Carter continues, “Hearing [Fitzgerald’s] voice was love.” With the pluck of the string, harmonic arpeggios, and instrumental technique that mimic the voice of Ella Fitzgerald, Regina Carter released her timely album Ella: Accentuate the Positive (cited under Accentuating Sound). The year 2017 marks the 100th birthday of famed jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, also noted as Mama Jazz, the Memorex Lady, and the First Lady of Song. While remembering the vocal ingenuity of Fitzgerald, variance, timbre, tone, texture, cadence, improvisation, and symphonic melody are all words that crown the First Lady of Song. Born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, Fitzgerald began singing in church when she and her mother moved from Virginia to New York. As an adolescent in 1934, she entered the Apollo Theater’s weekly amateur night competition. Inundated with trepidation at the audience’s reaction to known dancers, the Edwards Sisters, who competed before her, Fitzgerald decided to sing instead of dance. Much to her surprise after singing, Fitzgerald won the competition that night. In 1936, Fitzgerald produced her first recording with Decca Records. Known for her scat singing style and tuning her voice to sound like an instrument, Fitzgerald famously collaborated with jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, and other musicians. During the civil rights movement and years after, Ella’s appearances on The Nat King Cole Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Frank Sinatra Show, and other televised productions conveyed her ability to traverse racial barriers and disseminate her gift of song to all audiences, nationally and internationally. Fitzgerald has won thirteen Grammy Awards and sold forty million albums. This article first examines the theoretical frameworks of history and memory through which scholars examine African American expressive culture. It is through the accentuation of sound in text and in the intersections of music and literature that the gems of black culture and consciousness are found. The citations cover a breadth of material from jazz and literary theory, focusing on what Fitzgerald brings to the community, nation, and the world.

Latest results from GlueX

The GlueX experiment is housed in the newest experimental hall at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. It was successfully commissioned in 2015 and is in its third year of data taking. GlueX uses a 12 GeV electron beam incident on a diamond radiator, producing a linearly polarized, coherent Bremsstrahlung photon beam. The ultimate goal of GlueX is to search for exotic hybrid mesons (e.g. qq̄g), with either exotic or conventional quantum numbers, whose existence, or lack thereof, would allow for the exploration of the gluon-gluon coupling present in QCD through the manifestation of hadrons with gluonic degrees of freedom. Photo-production at these energies is fairly unexplored and the linear beam polarization allows GlueX to discriminate between various production mechanisms which may be an effective way to identify such exotic hybrid mesons. In addition to exotic mesons, GlueX will also be poised to map out the conventional meson spectrum and to study the spectrum of excited vector mesons, which are often poorly understood. In these proceedings, we will present an overview of the GlueX experiment, its goals, current physics results, and future plans.

Edward and Emma Whitehurst in Slavery

This interlude takes readers back into the antebellum period to understand what propelled Edward and Emma Whitehurst into Union lines in May 1861. It describes their lives in slavery, from Emma’s work as a field hand to Edward’s labor as a “hired-out” slave, a position that enabled them to save his wages in the hope of one day purchasing their freedom. It also narrates the arrival of war in their part of Newport News, Virginia, and the way in which planters in the region began leaving the area first. This opened up room for enslaved people like the Whitehursts to flee to Union lines beginning in mid-May, 1861.

StormSense: A New Integrated Network of IoT Water Level Sensors in the Smart Cities of Hampton Roads, VA

Propagation of cost-effective water level sensors powered through the Internet of Things (IoT) has expanded the available offerings of ingestible data streams at the disposal of modern smart cities. StormSense is an IoT-enabled inundation forecasting research initiative and an active participant in the Global City Teams Challenge, seeking to enhance flood preparedness in the smart cities of Hampton Roads, VA, for flooding resulting from storm surge, rain, and tides. In this study, we present the results of the new StormSense water level sensors to help establish the “regional resilience monitoring network” noted as a key recommendation from the Intergovernmental Pilot Project. To accomplish this, the Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency's Tidewatch tidal forecast system is being used as a starting point to integrate the extant (NOAA) and new (United States Geological Survey [USGS] and StormSense) water level sensors throughout the region and demonstrate replicability of the solution across the cities of Newport News, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach within Hampton Roads, VA. StormSense's network employs a mix of ultrasonic and radar remote sensing technologies to record water levels during 2017 Hurricanes Jose and Maria. These data were used to validate the inundation predictions of a street level hydrodynamic model (5-m resolution), whereas the water levels from the sensors and the model were concomitantly validated by a temporary water level sensor deployed by the USGS in the Hague and crowd-sourced GPS maximum flooding extent observations from the sea level rise app, developed in Norfolk, VA.

Signing Up in the Shipyard

This chapter recounts the successful effort by a multi-racial group of 19,000 men and women at the Newport News shipyard to form a union with the steelworkers union in 1978, and a brutal strike in 1979 in which the workers fought for a union contract. The civil and women’s rights movements clearly fed the union fire in this organizing campaign.

Skilled Immigrants and American Industrialization: Lessons from Newport News Shipyard

In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.

“Do you need help?”: Dialogics of Change in Community-Based Theatre

It was a hot, sweaty day in Newport News, Virginia, in 1986. Cornerstone Theater's designer, Lynn Jeffries, was building a set for the company's first community-based production, Our Town, cast in part with local participants. Three kids rode up on bikes and drawled, “What y'all doin’?” Jeffries responded that they were building a set for a play, noting that she felt like she was “speaking Chinese.” The boys sat for several more minutes. “Do you need help?” And that, according to Jeffries, was “where it all kicked in.”