US-South Africa Cooperative Research: Nuclear Physics

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0079949WhisnantThis award supports a new research collaboration between C. Steven Whisnant, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, and Simon Connell, Schonland Research Center for Nuclear Sciences (SRC) at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), Johannesburg, South Africa. During the course of the three-year award, the researchers will collaborate on theoretical and experimental nuclear physics research on nucleon and meson interactions using photon beams. With separate funding, a recent graduate of WITS will work as a postdoc on the project.Professor Whisnant's experimental photonuclear physics program is conducted at the Laser Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and with the Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jlab). As part of the NA59 collaboration at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the researchers at WITS are pursuing a complementary program studying the internal structure of the nucleon through meson photoproduction at very high photon energies. The NA59 collaboration has developed techniques for producing and analyzing the degree of polarization of circularly polarized photon beams that can provide valuable direct information on the beam polarization at LEGS and Jlab. Conversely, the polarized target technology developed for LEGS can significantly enhance the CERN program. The theoretical input provided by the researchers in South Africa spans both energy regions and will be a valuable aid in data analysis and the design of new experiments.