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MIT/Bates

The MIT/Bates facility has been in operation for two decades, and has carried out many important experiments that have contributed greatly to our understanding of nuclei. Construction of the ``South Hall Ring," a major facility improvement, was begun in 1988 to increase the duty factor of the beams available at Bates from %to 85%, greatly increasing its capabilities for coincidence experiments. Commissioning of the ring is now underway, and it has already demonstrated its ability to store and extract beam.

Two major instrumentation projects, the Out-Of-Plane Spectrometer System (OOPS), and a focal plane polarimeter (FPP) for the existing hadron spectrometer, are in the final phases of construction and commissioning; these devices will provide major new opportunities to investigate the details of nuclear and nucleon structure exploiting spin degrees of freedom in electron scattering. In addition, the recently completed SAMPLE detector is beginning investigations of the weak neutral current structure of the nucleon.

A collaboration of 70 physicists from 13 institutions and 3 countries has proposed the construction of the BLAST detector to provide a unique capability for carrying out experiments in the new ring using the ``internal target" technique. As is the case at CEBAF, there has been a major investment in new instrumentation, and the critical issue now is operating the facility and its associated instrumentation to carry out the measurements that motivated the construction projects.

cardman@cebaf.gov