9314535 Pittel This Americas Program award will support Prof. Stuart Pittel of the Bartol Research Institute in a theoretical study of nuclear structure with Prof. Alejandro Frank of the Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The investigators intend to study mapping methods to provide reliable approximate treatments of multi-quark hamiltonian systems. Various approaches will be tested in the context of an exactly solvable model of quark systems that admits both two- and three-quark correlations. Exact solutions of this model problem will also be used to extract useful insight on the quark structure of real nuclei. The proposed research will benefit from the expertise of the U.S. investigator in mapping techniques and their application to quark systems, while the Mexican investigator will contribute his expertise in group theoretical methods in physics. In addition, the proposed work will involve various groups in Spain that have been collaborating with the two investigators over the past few years. ***
