Investigations of the structure and electromagnetic interactions of few-body systems

In order to make it easy for the reader to see the specific research carried out and the progress make, the following report of progress is done by topic. Each item has a format layout of Topic, Investigators, Objective, Significance, and Description of Progress, followed at the end by the relevant references. As is clear from the topics listed, the emphasis of the GWU theory group has been on the structure and electromagnetic interactions of few-body nuclei. Both low- and intermediate-energy electromagnetic disintegration of these nuclei is considered. When the excitation energy of the target nucleus is low, the aim has been carry out the continuum part of the theoretical work exactly, this is, by means of exact three- and four-body dynamics. When structure questions are the issue, exact calculations are always carried through, limited only by the underlying two-body or three-body interactions used as input. Implicit in our work is the question of how far one can go within the traditional nuclear physics framework, i.e., nucleons and mesons in a nonrelativistic setting. Our central goal is to carry through state-of-the-art few-body calculations that will serve as an unambiguous means of determining at what point standard nuclear physics requires quark degrees of freedom in order to understand the phenomena in question. So far, in the problems considered, there has been no evidence of the necessity to go beyond the traditional approach, though we always keep in mind that possibility. As our work is involved with questions in the intermediate-energy realm, moving from a nonrelativistic framework to a relativistic one is always a consideration. Currently, for the problems that have been pursued in this domain of energy, the issues concern far more the mechanisms of the reactions and structural questions than the need to move to relativistic dynamics