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Nuclear Interaction Group in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology The research focus of the Nuclear Interaction Group at MIT, LNS is to understand the fundamental nature of nuclear interactions and the dynamical structure of nucleons and nuclei.  The physics information is obtained by experiments in which high-energy beams of electrons or photons interact with target made of protons, few-body nuclear systems, or more complex nuclei.  The scattered electrons and other particles ejected from the reaction are detected and the probabilities for such process to happen (cross sections) are extracted. In many experiments, spin polarizations of the beam, target and/or the ejected particles are used to extract unique information.  Because the electrons and photons are point-like particles with no known internal structure or excited states, and because their electro-magnetic interaction with the target is relatively weak and well understood (as opposed to the strong interaction among the constituents of the target itself), they penetrate deeply into the target nucleon or nuclei without disturbing its substructure, thus enabling the extraction of the internal structure of the nuclear or nucleon target with a relatively easy interpretation. The Nuclear Interaction Group is also engaged in study of the electro-weak Standard Model. In particular, one can extract the weak coupling of quarks by measuring parity violation cross section difference of deep inelastic electron scattering on a isoscaler target. To achieve the highest quality of  the measurements, continuous-wave (CW) electron accelerators with energies of a few GeV are esential. Our group, therefore, performs its experiments at facilites at the leading edge of the field, including MIT/Bates (Middleton, MA), the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) (Newport News, VA), and MAMI (Mainz, Germany).  You may choose " Previous Research ", "Research Highlights" and "Future Projects" to learn more about our completed, ongoing, as well as future research programs at these facilities. Established in 19??, the Nuclear Interaction Group has produced 1? Ph.D. theses. Most of our former Ph.D. students have become leaders of their field in either scientific research or industrial laboratories. We have published more than ??? publications on prestigeous journals and ??? of them are widely sited by the scientific community. Many of our group members have been invited to speak at national and internation conferences. To learn more about our group's history and achievement, choose "Publications", "PhD Thesis", "Previous Research" and "Previous Members". We are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics. This page is maintained by Xiaochao Zheng, last updated April 2006.