Department Directory

Nuclear Physics

Ronald Gilman - home page

Directory information

Position: Distinguished Professor, Associate Chair and Graduate Program Director
Research group: Experimental nuclear physics
Email address: rgilman@physics.rutgers.edu
Telephone: (848) 445-8775 (but email is much better)
Office: Serin W212
Mailing address: Ronald Gilman
  Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
136 Frelinghuysen Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 USA

Teaching Activities

As Graduate Program Director I host the Seminar in Physics, 750:633 in the fall term and 750:634 in the spring term.


Research Activities

My research has focused on the structure of nucleons and few body-body nuclei, investigated with probes such as photons, electrons, muons, and pions, at probe energies ranging from hundreds of MeV to hundreds of GeV.

In recent years my focus has mainly resulted from the proton radius puzzle, originally published by Randolf Pohl et al. in Nature in July 2010. The proton size appeared to be different when measured with electons vs. when measured with muonic hydrogen. The MUSE experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland measures electron and muon scattering with both positive and negative beam polarities. We investigate lepton universality, the proton form factors and radius, and whether one obtains the same results with + charged particles (never before done) as with - charged particles. The comparison of + and - charged probes is sensitive to a higher-order correction needed to determine the radius from experimental measurements.

The MUSE experiment is typical of my work at Rutgers in that I work closely with Prof. Ron Ransome as well as with colleagues from several other universities and laboratories from around the world.

In addition to MUSE, I have been involved in Seaquest, a ``Drell-Yan'' experiment at Fermilab, in Batavia Illinois, that measures nucleon and nuclear sea quark distributions, and in a few experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLAB) using a 12 GeV electron accelerator, CEBAF, in Newport News, Virginia.

More information, with links and some future plans, can be found in the nuclear group experimental online projects page.


Publications

I have authored / co-authored a few hundred papers. A nearly complete list of my publications can be found, for example, with an inspirehep.net search with default ordering or ordered by number of citations.


Please send any comments on this page to rgilman@physics.rutgers.edu.

Revised March 2023