(Griffioen, Butuceanu, Armstrong, along with emeritus professor H. Funsten)

The CLAS (CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer) in Hall B at Jefferson Lab, provides a wealth of opportunities to study hadronic structure and interactions. In particular, the W & M group has played a leading role in the "e6" running group of experiments (experiments using 6 GeV electron beams) with CLAS. These include:

• Experiment E94019 with Griffioen as spokesperson, along with M. Strikman (Penn State) and K. Egiyan (Yerevan Inst.), is a search for color transparency in double rescattering processes in deuterium. Perturbative QCD indicates that, inelastic electron scattering at high Q², which samples components of the nucleon wavefunction wherein the quarks are very close together, should produce a point-like wave packet with temporarily reduced strong interaction (hence "transparent"). Search for this behavior is the goal of this measurement.

• Experiment E94-102, Griffioen spokesperson, along with S. Kuhn (Old Dominion U.), which is a study of electron scattering from high-momentum nucleons in deuterium. This will search for changes in internal structure of the nucleons when they are in a closely-separated pair (i.e. where they are at high relative momentum). In an extreme model, the scattering in such cases takes place from a 6-quark bag, rather than from two distinct nucleons. The scattered electrons are measured in coincidence with backward-going protons (relative to the virtual photon direction) in the elastic, resonance, and deep-inelastic kinematic regions. Cornel Butuceanu will base his PhD thesis on these data.

CLAS e6 WWW page