Templon The atomic nuclei consists of nucleons (neutrons and protons); these are bound together by a delicate balance of strong, short-range repulsive forces and longer-range but weaker attractive forces, which operate between pairs of nucleons. The attractive forces are exhibited in many well-studied nuclear phenomena, but the repulsive short-range forces have proved elusive and have only been studied indirectly in nuclei. The research carried out under this grant is aimed at studying nuclear reactions, initiated by electron-beam bombardment, which are explicitly sensitive to the short-range repulsive forces between the nucleons. The mechanism by which these nuclear reactions proceed will also be studied, since these reactions occur with very small probability and are therefore sensitive to other, multiple-step reactions which can occur. Some of these multiple-step reactions are interesting in their own right anyway, since they depend on the quark structure of nucleons, and quarks are the ultimate fundamental particles from which neutrons, protons, mesons and nuclei are made. ***
