Scattering and Reactions of Intermediate Energy Projectiles

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This grant will support the experimental work of the Intermediate Energy Nuclear Physics Group at Rutgers University.The Rutgers group carries out experiments primarilyat the continuous electron beam accelerator, CEBAF, located at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. Their experiments are aimed atimproving our understanding of the structure of nucleons. Althoughwe know the basic building blocks of nucleons are quarks and gluons,how they interact to give the nucleon its observed properties isstill not well known. Our experiments use spin, a fundamental propertyof sub-atomic particles, as a sensitive probe of thenucleon. One type of experiment measures the polarization ofejected protons when polarized (spin-aligned) electrons are scatteredfrom nucleons. This determines the distributions of charge andmagnetization in the proton, and how those distributions are changedwhen the proton is bound in a nucleus. Another type of experimentsuses polarized photons absorbed on deuterium. The polarization ofthe outgoing protons is sensitive to the mechanism of the absorption,and hence to the way the quarks and gluons interact in the deuteron. The third major type of experiments use electrons scattered from apolarized helium target to study the quark spin structure of the neutron.