SSP2012 - 5th International Symposium on Symmetries in Subatomic Physics

The Qweak collaboration recently completed a two year long program of measurements, with the aim of making a precision measurement of the parity violating analyzing power from elastic scattering of 1.16 GeV, longitudinally polarized, electrons on protons at very low $Q^2$. At low momentum transfer, the measured asymmetry is directly related to the weak charge of the proton $Q_W^p = 1 -...

Atomic parity non-conservation (PNC) experiments provide unique precision tests of the electroweak sector of the standard model at very low energies. Precision measurements of spin-dependent atomic PNC can determine nuclear anapole moments and probe the weak interaction within the nucleus. Among current efforts on PNC are ongoing experiments in a chain of Ytterbium and Dysprosium isotopes at...

After a series of parity violation electron scattering experiments in order to explore the strangeness content of the nucleon, we plan on a new, improved parity violation experiment where we will measure the weak charge of the proton with a relative accuracy of 1.7%. This accuracy results in a measurement of the effective electroweak mixing angle sin^2 theta_W of 1.5 per mille, in...