26 July 2026 to 1 August 2026
University of Maryland, College Park
US/Eastern timezone

Inferring Parton Distributions with Gaussian Processes

29 Jul 2026, 09:00
20m
Benjamin Banneker A (Adele H. Stamp Student Union)

Benjamin Banneker A

Adele H. Stamp Student Union

3972 Campus Dr, College Park, MD 20742
Contributed talk Structure of hadrons and nuclei Structure of hadrons and nuclei

Speaker

Yamil Cahuana Medrano (William and Mary)

Description

Extracting parton distribution functions (PDFs) from Lattice QCD is crucial for understanding nucleon structure, but it fundamentally relies on solving a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. In this talk, I will present an overview of my work on addressing this problem within the pseudo-PDF framework. First, I will outline how Gaussian processes (GPs) provide flexible Bayesian priors that encode correlations and physical constraints without fixing a functional shape. Then, I will explain the different levels of inference from which one can obtain different types of reconstruction. Finally, I will show how to integrate all the models explored into a model selection/averaging procedure to obtain a more robust reconstruction of PDFs using different information criteria.

Author

Yamil Cahuana Medrano (William and Mary)

Presentation materials