Patrick Barry

 

Patrick is in his 6th year at NCSU.  His research includes the study of parton distribution functions (PDFs) of pions.  The pion is made up of a "valence" quark and anti-quark.  However, there are many quarks and antiquarks constantly creating and annihilating in the "sea" of the pion.  We can quantify the contribution of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons by the PDF.  Fits to Drell-Yan and Leading Neutron datasets using the nested sampling algorithm provide the most accurate pion PDFs at both low and high momentum fraction of the pion.  Patrick is now studying threshold resummation in the Drell-Yan process to better pin down the pion's PDF at very high momentum fraction.

In 2020, Patrick went to Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia to participate in the DOE SCGSR award.  His award period was from January 6th-June 26th.  While the pandemic hit in mid-March, Patrick was still able to be on site at Jefferson Lab and interact with the scientists at the facility.  Patrick plans to graduate at the end of the calendar year.

Patrick completed his preliminary exam in April 2019.  Also in 2019, Patrick participated in the Jefferson Lab User's Organization graduate student poster competition and won 1st prize.  Also, Patrick applied for the DOE SCGSR award and was chosen as a participant for a 6 month period in 2020.

In 2018, Patrick again participated in the Graduate Research Symposium and his poster was awarded 3rd place in the category of "Mathematical and Physical Sciences".  Patrick published his first article on October 10, 2018 in Physical Review Letters.  This article was also featured in Physics on the APS website.  The synopsis can be found here.  NC State's research blog, The Abstract, also picked up a story on the article, which can be found here.

Patrick participated in the 2017 Graduate Research Symposium.