Physics Division annual report, April 1, 1995--March 31, 1996

The past year has seen several major advances in the Division`s research programs. In heavy-ion physics these include experiments with radioactive beams of interest to nuclear astrophysics, a first exploration of the structure of nuclei situated beyond the proton drip line, the discovery of new proton emitters--the heaviest known, the first unambiguous detection of discrete linking transitions between superdeformed and normal deformed states, and the impact of the APEX results which were the first to report, conclusively, no sign of the previously reported sharp electron positron sum lines. The medium energy nuclear physics program of the Division has led the first round of experiments at the CEBAF accelerator at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the study of color transparency in rho meson propagation at the HERMES experiment at DESY, and it has established nuclear polarization in a laser driven polarized hydrogen target. In atomic physics, the non-dipolar contribution to photoionization has been quantitatively established for the first time, the atomic physics beamline at the Argonne 7 GeV Advanced Photon Source was constructed and, by now, first experiments have been successfully performed. The theory program has pushed exact many-body calculations with fully realistic interactions (the Argonne v{sub 18} potential) to the seven-nucleon system, and interesting results have been obtained for the structure of deformed nuclei through meanfield calculations and for the structure of baryons with QCD calculations based on the Dyson-Schwinger approach. Brief summaries are given of the individual research programs