• Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

February 6, 2026 3:30 PM - February 6, 2026 4:30 PM
PAIS 1100

Host:

Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine

Presenter:

Christopher Monahan (Colorado College)

Video Recording

Protons and neutrons account for 95% of the mass of the visible universe, yet many of their properties remain poorly understood. Determining the internal structure of these particles from first principles has been a longstanding challenge in nuclear physics, made all the more pressing by the need for precision in interpreting data at the Large Hadron Collider. Recent advances in lattice quantum chromodynamics have made such calculations tractable, offering the first ab initio determinations of proton structure through numerical solution of the strong force. I will introduce these developments and discuss the Hadstruc Collaboration's ongoing program to extract the internal quark and gluon structure of protons and neutrons using the reduced pseudo-distribution framework, connecting our work to the worldwide effort to understand nucleon structure.

About Christopher Monahan

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Colorado College. Broadly speaking, I use supercomputers to study the strong nuclear force that binds together the protons and neutrons at the heart of most of the visible matter in the Universe. Currently, the only method we have for studying the properties of the strong force in a systematic way is lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which allows us to numerically solve the equations governing the strong force. I study how quarks and gluons come together to form protons and neutrons and how we can use lattice QCD as part of our search for new physics and unknown particles. You can find out more at cjmonahan.net.