The experiments discussed in this thesis exploit parity violation in elastic electron proton scattering in order to measure properties of the nucleon. Both experiments make use of the high quality, highly polarized electron beam available at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Q_weak will measure the weak mixing angle, sin²θ_W, via a measurement of the weak charge of the proton, at a four-momentum transfer, Q² ~ 0.026 GeV²/c². The precision of this measurement gives Q_weak access to new physics at the scale of 2.3 TeV, making it a test of the standard model. The G⁰ experimental program provides the fully separated contributions of the strange quark to the charge and magnetization distributions of the nucleon at two different values of four-momentum transfer, Q² ~ 0.22 and 0.63 GeV²/c². The measurement of the strange quark content of the proton in the G⁰ experimental program and other parity-violating electron scattering experiments provides a measurement of the hadronic contribution to the asymmetry in Q_weak. In addition, G⁰ was able to measure the parity-conserving beam normal single spin asymmetries that provide a measurement of the imaginary part of two photon exchange. The measurement of this asymmetry is necessary to understand the systematic contribution to measurements of parity-violating asymmetries, but it is also an important physics result. Recent theoretical work has shown that higher order radiative effects, such as two photon exchange, may be able to explain discrepancies between experiments which measure the ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton. The measurement of the transverse or beam normal single spin asymmetries provides a benchmark for theories that estimate the size of radiative corrections that are important for precision electroweak scattering experiments such as those described in this thesis. The results of the measurement of the transverse asymmetries at backward angles in G⁰ are presented at the two values of Q² ~ 0.22 and 0.63 GeV²/c² for hydrogen. Results for deuterium, which can provide the first measurements of the beam normal single spin asymmetries on the neutron, are also presented. / Ph. D.

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The experiment E06010 measured the target single spin asymmetry (SSA) in the semiinclusive deep inelastic (SIDIS) n↑(e,éπ¯)X reaction with a transversely polarized 3He target as an effective neutron target. This is the very first independent measurement of the neutron SSA, following the measurements at HERMES and COMPASS on the proton and the deuteron. The experiment acquired data in Hall A at Jefferson Laboratory with a continuous electron beam of energy 5.9 GeV, probing the valence quark region, with x = 0.13→0.41, at Q2 = 1.31→3.1 GeV2. The two contributing mechanisms to the measured asymmetry, viz, the Collins effect and the Sivers effect can be realized through the variation of the asymmetry as a function of the Collins and Sivers angles. The neutron Collins and Sivers moments, associated with the azimuthal angular modulations, are extracted from the measured asymmetry for the very first time and are presented in this thesis. The kinematics of this experiment is comparable to the HERMES proton measurement. However, the COMPASS measurements on deuteron and proton are in the low-x region. The results of this experiment are crucial as the first step toward the extraction of quark transversity and Sivers distribution functions in SIDIS. With the existing results on proton and deuteron, these new results on neutron will provide powerful constraints on the transversity and Sivers distributions of both the u and d-quarks in the valence region.

The quest to understand how the nucleon spin is decomposed into its constituent quark and gluon spin and orbital angular momentum (OAM) components has been at the forefront of nuclear physics for decades. Due to the non-perturbative nature of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - the theory describing how quarks and gluons bind together to form protons and neutrons - making absolute predictions of nucleon spin structure is generally difficult, especially as a function of its quark and gluon longitudinal momentum fraction x. Measurements involving nucleon spin structure serve as a sensitive test for QCD, including ab-initio lattice QCD calculations due to the advent of the quasi-PDF formalism, and various predictions that diverge at large-x. The neutron spin asymmetry A1n at high-x is a key observable for probing nucleon spin structure. In the valence domain (x > 0.5), sea effects are expected to be negligible, and so the total nucleon spin is considered to be carried by the valence quarks. The valence region can therefore enable us to study the role of quark OAM and other non-perturbative effects of the strong force. A1^n was measured in the deep inelastic scattering region of 0.40 < x < 0.75 and 6 < Q^2 < 10 GeV^2 in Hall C at Jefferson Lab using a 10.4 GeV longitudinally polarized electron beam, upgraded polarized He-3 target, and the High Momentum Spectrometer (HMS) and Super High Momentum Spectrometer (SHMS). E12-06-110 provides the first precision data in the valence quark region above x = 0.60, and its preliminary results proved consistent with earlier data disqualifying a pQCD model that excluded quark OAM. Combined with previous world proton data, the ratio of the polarized-to-unpolarized up quark momentum distribution (∆u + ∆anti-u)/(u + anti-u) remained positive at large-x, and the down quark (∆d + ∆anti-d)/(d + anti-d) remained negative. / Physics

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