Douglas Stairs Ph.D. (Harvard '61) William C. MacDonald Professor Emeritus 398-6517, [email protected]

My scientific activity is in the field of particle physics. With my colleagues Profs. Corriveau and Hanna, I have been engaged for some years in research at HERA, a high energy electron-proton colliding beam facility at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. The centre-of-mass energy of HERA is high enough to permit a broad spectrum of studies in both the hadronic and electroweak sectors of particle physics.

Our experiments are carried out with the ZEUS detector, a large and complex installation with many sophisticated sub-systems. The principal focus of most ZEUS research is the sub-structure of the proton, as expressed in the momentum distributions of its quarks and gluons. However, the richness of the physics at HERA, combined with the excellent capabilities of ZEUS, enables us to investigate a remarkable range of interesting topics including, for example, hard photoproduction, the nature of diffractive processes at high energy , the production of states containing heavy quarks and the search for exotic particles and possible manifestations of quark sub-structure. My current research interests are in hard photoproduction and the determination of the pion structure function using the Forward Neutron Calorimeter.