Progress report on nuclear spectroscopic studies

The experimental program in nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is led by Professors Carrol Bingham, Lee Riedinger, and Soren Sorenseni who respectively lead the studies of the exotic decay modes of nuclei far from stability, the program of high-spin research, and our effort in relativistic heavy-ion physics. Over the years, this broad program of research has been successful partially because of the shared University resources applied to this group effort. The proximity of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has allowed us to build extremely strong programs of joint research, and in addition to play an important leadership role in the Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research (JIHIR). Our experimental program is also very closely linked with those at other national laboratories: Argonne (collaborations involving the Fragment Mass Analyzer (FMA) and {gamma}-ray arrays), Brookhaven (the RHIC and Phenix projects), and Berkeley (GAMMASPHERE). We have worked closely with a variety of university groups in the last three years, especially those in the UNISOR and now UNIRIB collaborations. And, in all aspects of our program, we have maintained close collaborations with theorists, both to inspire the most exciting experiments to perform and to extract the pertinent physics from the results. The specific areas discussed in this report are: properties of high-spin states; study of low-energy levels of nuclei far from stability; and high energy heavy-ion physics