The Grainger College of Engineering
Physics

Caroline Kathrin Riedl

Caroline Kathrin Riedl
Caroline Kathrin Riedl she/her/hers

Primary Research Area

  • Nuclear Physics
Associate Research Professor
467 Loomis Laboratory

Biography

Caroline Riedl completed her undergraduate physics degree in 2001 and her graduate degree in particle physics in 2005, both at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany). She was then a fellow with INFN Frascati and a postdoc at DESY, while working with the HERMES at DESY collaboration and later the CMS at CERN collaboration. She joined the UIUC physics faculty in 2013 as a research assistant professor, was stationed at CERN between 2014 and 2018 and has been a full research professor since 2024.

In recent years, Riedl's research has been focused on the transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) structure of nucleons and nuclei, on which data from the sPHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Lab in proton-proton collisions and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering or Drell-Yan data from the COMPASS experiment at CERN help shed some light. Both experiments study the azimuthal distributions of final-state particles emerging from the scattering process relative to the spin orientation of the transversely polarized proton or nucleus. She was the project manager for two major UIUC-built instrumentation contributions to these projects - a drift chamber for COMPASS (DC5), and most of the absorber blocks for the sPHENIX electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal).

Now continuing her research activities before joining UIUC, she studies diffractive DIS data at the future electron-ion collider (EIC) and their simulation in the first EIC detector, ePIC. Diffractive signatures are sensitive to spatial distributions of partons in the nucleon or nucleus.

Academic Positions

  • Research Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Nuclear Physics. Since 2024
  • Research Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nuclear Physics. 2021-2024
  • Research Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nuclear Physics. 2013 - 2021.
  • Research Associate (Postdoc), DESY-Zeuthen, Germany. Particle Physics. 2006 - 2012.
  • Research Associate (Fellow), INFN Fracsati, Italy. Particle Physics. 2005 - 2006.
  • Graduate student / teaching assistant, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. 2002 - 2005.

Other Instructional Activities

  • 497 independent study sping 2022
  • 497 independent study spring 2021
  • 403 instructor in fall 2013

Research Statement

I am interested in the structure of nucleons and nuclei. Modern approaches to investigate nuclear structure involve transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions (TMDs) and generalized parton distributions (GPDs). COMPASS at CERN collected TMD-related Drell-Yan data in 2015 and 2018. The analysis of these data hints to a sign change between the Sivers TMD measured in Drell-Yan vs. that measured in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. In 2022, COMPASS collected semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering data on a transversely polarized deuteron target; these data will allow for better constraints of the transversity TDM PDF and the related tensor charge, a fundamental property of the nucleon. The sPHENIX 2024 data collected with transversely polarized proton beams also allows for TMD-related studies. Illinois students are analyzing the 2022 COMPASS and the 2024 sPHENIX data. In parallel, we prepare simulations and hardware for the ePIC experiment at the Electron Ion Collider, the future polarized electron-proton collider at BNL to start data taking in the mid-1930s.

Some of my recent talks:

Research Interests

  • Experimental nuclear and particle physics: investigation of the spin and multi-dimensional structure of nucleons and nuclei
  • Transverse-momentum dependent parton distribution functions (TMD PDFs) in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (SIDIS), Drell-Yan processes, and proton-proton collisions (pp)
  • Generalized parton distributions (GPDs) in exclusive diffractive processes in DIS, and the effects of gluon saturation
  • Development and construction of detectors for nuclear and particle physics research

Selected Articles in Journals

Articles in Conference Proceedings