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

This renewal proposal 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 three years we have focused our attention ever more sharply on experiments with real tagged photons at CEBAF. We are part of the Hall-B Collaboration at CEBAF. We are co-spokespersons on two approved CEBAF experiments, Photoreactions on {sup 3}He and Photoabsorption and Photofission of Nuclei, and we are preparing another, Nondiffractive Photoproduction of the {rho} Meson with Linearly Polarized Photons, for presentation to the next CEBAF PAC. We are part of the team that is instrumenting the Photon Tagger and a high-energy tagged polarized-photon beam for Hall B; some of the instrumentation for these projects is being built at our Nuclear Detector Laboratory, under the auspices of The George Washington University Center for Nuclear Studies. Our recent measurements of pion scattering from {sup 3}H and {sup 3}He at LAMPF and of cluster knockout from few-body nuclei at NIKHEF have yielded very provocative results, showing the importance of the very light nuclei as a laboratory for quantifying important aspects of the nuclear many-body force. We look forward to expanding our studies of short-range forces in nuclei, particularly the very fight nuclei using electromagnetic probes and employing the extraordinary power of CEBAF and the CLAS