Kemal Tezgin

Hello, welcome to my page.

I’m Kemal Tezgin, and I’m a theoretical physicist working in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), with a particular focus on the internal structure of the proton in terms of its partonic (quarks and gluons) degrees of freedom. Despite their fundamental importance in hadronic physics, it is still a major challenge to unlock the fundamental properties of the proton, such as the origin of its mass and spin in terms of its partonic degrees of freedom. It is a major challenge because it is a strongly interacting many-body system governed by nonperturbative QCD dynamics. The lack of exact mathematical tools to compute correlation functions analytically in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) necessitates the development of effective theoretical models, phenomenological studies, and computational tools to analyze experimental data on strong interactions.

My research is mainly on developing theoretical approaches to better understand the complex dynamics of strong interactions. Specifically, I study the three-dimensional distributions of energy, momentum, angular momentum, pressure, and shear forces carried by quarks and gluons within the proton. These distributions are encoded in the form factors of the QCD energy-momentum tensor (EMT) and provide insights into the long-standing puzzles in QCD, such as the origin of proton mass and spin. Since the EMT describes how matter couples to gravity, probing these form factors directly is experimentally impractical. However, there is an indirect route to key EMT form factors through generalized parton distribution functions (GPDs), which can be probed via certain exclusive processes. GPDs are nonperturbative functions that encode correlations between the longitudinal momentum and transverse position of partons, and they provide a multidimensional picture of the proton’s internal structure. Most of my work focuses on improving our understanding of GPDs and EMT form factors.

To connect these theoretical studies with experiments, I am also interested in developing computational tools and Monte Carlo event generators for exclusive processes, and conducting impact studies with them to assess how future data from the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) experiments could improve our understanding of the proton’s internal structure.

Another area of my research focuses on applications of resurgence theory in physics, particularly evaluating how much information about non-perturbative effects, such as instantons (quantum tunneling events), is encoded in the coefficients of perturbation theory. These connections reveal the fruitful interplay of geometry, topology, and the asymptotics of expansions near critical points and yield an unambiguous trans-series representation of observables.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia, working with Dr. Simonetta Liuti in the ExclAIm collaboration. I earned my Ph.D. in physics from the University of Connecticut in December 2020, where I conducted my research under the supervision of Dr. Peter Schweitzer.