This award will support a seminar on "Pion-Nucleus Interactions above the Delta Resonance," organized jointly by Professor David J. Ernst, Department of Physics, Texas A & M University, and Professor Hiroshi Toki, Department of Physics, Tokyo Metropolitan University. Participants will meet in Tsukuba, Japan, to exchange recent research results and promote future joint research projects on the interaction of pions (the lightest mesons) with nuclei in the energy region from 300 MeV to 1.5 GeV. Recent advances at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility in the United States and at KEK (National Laboratory for High-Energy Physics) in Japan, and a proposed upgrade to the Los Alamos facility, make a meeting between physicists from the two countries timely. The seminar is designed to provide detailed information on the experimental facilities of each country, to discuss and clarify the physics questions that can be addressed by these facilities, and to promote future cooperative agreements between the research communities of the two countries.
