A program in medium energy nuclear physics. Progress report, January 1, 1992--March 31, 1995

This progress report and continuation proposal summarizes our achievements for the period from July 1, 1994 to September 30, 1995 and requests continued funding for our program in experimental medium-energy nuclear physics. The focus of our program remains the understanding of the short-range part of the strong interaction in the nuclear medium. In the past year we have focused our attention ever more sharply on experiments with real tagged photons, and we have successfully defended two new experimental proposals: Photofission of Actinide and Preactinide Nuclei at SAL and Photoproduction of the {rho} Meson from the Proton with Linearly Polarized Photons at CEBAF. (We are co-spokespersons on two previously approved Hall-B experiments at CEBAF, Photoreactions on {sup 3}He and Photoabsorption and Photofission of Nuclei.) As part of the team that is instrumenting the Photon Tagger for Hall B; we report excellent progress on the focal-plane detector array that is being built at our Nuclear Detector Laboratory, as well as progress on our plans for instrumentation of a tagged polarized-photon beam using coherent bremsstrahlung. Also, we shall soon receive a large computer system (from the SSC) which will form the basis for our new Data Analysis Center, which, like the Nuclear Detector Laboratory, will be operated under the auspices of The George Washington University Center for Nuclear Studies. Finally, during the past year we have published six more papers on the results of our measurements of pion scattering at LAMPF and of electron scattering at NIKHEF and Bates, and we can report that nearly all of the remaining papers documenting this long series of measurements are in the pipeline