Nuclear Physics Division Biennial Report 1997-1998

This report brings out, in brief, an overview of the research and development activities of the Division during the last two years. The main work-horse for the experimental research had been our 14 MV Pelletron Accelerator facility situated at TIFR. This facility, this year, also completed ten years of a very fruitful and productive operation. The beam time available to users during this period had been outstanding. It was around (60-70)%, which is very much at the international level of any efficiently run facility. To mark the occasion a two day seminar was held. In addition the division had collaborative research programs at various international advanced accelerators centres, like RHIC, CERN, COSY, RIKEN and Legnaro. These collaboration involved the development and fabrication of detector systems for quark-gluon plasma experiments at RHIC and eta-meson production at COSY. The experiments were carried out at these centres using the heavy-ion and the intermediate energy proton/deuteron beams. On the development side, the main efforts have been on the installation and commissioning of the Folded Tandem Ion Accelerator (FOTIA). The machine is expected to be ready soon during the current year. In addition, a write-up for a multi-GeV hadron facility proposal has also been initiated during the last two years by the division. (author)