A Group of physicists consisting of three faculty, two research associates and five graduate students is performing experiments to study the details of the strong interactions among elementary particles. The program consists of three major components: 1. Experiment E776 at the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron. A large sample of about one billion events produced through the interaction protons with protons and neutrons with protons is being studied. A variety of important physics topics is being investigated in a detail never before possible. 2. A new approach to massive computation and on-line data acquisition. To achieve the sensitivity required, the group has developed and is now implementing a hardware computational system that acts in consort with the data acquisition. The system has achieved 41 gigaoperations per second (compared to 1 giga=operation per second for a Cray X-MP) and data bandwidths of 32 gigabytes per second. This performance has been achieved at about 2% of the cost of a Cray X-MP. 3. Experiment E609 at the Fermilab Tevatron. Much of the apparatus from the Brookhaven experiment has been moved to Fermilab where the program will continue at higher energy. The full power of the hardware will be used to investigate rare phenomena.
