The Division of Nuclear Physics Town Meeting on Nuclear Physics with Electromagnetic Probes was held at Argonne National Laboratory on January 27-28, 1995. The agenda for the meeting is included as Appendix A of this document, and the participants in the meeting (a total of 95 physicists) are listed in Appendix B. The goals of the meeting were: to highlight the scientific achievements since the 1989 NSAC Long Range Plan; to assess the current situation and near-term prospects of the field; and to provide input to the upcoming NSAC Long Range Plan by identifying the highest priority open questions in the field, and the human and technical resources necessary to address them.
In this paper the organizers of the Town Meeting summarize the answers to these questions as they were formulated at the Town Meeting and in numerous discussions with colleagues who were unable to attend the meeting. It was produced with substantial input from the presentations [TM95] of the speakers at the Town Meeting (see Appendix A), and from the discussions there. Due to the limited time available for writing this white paper it was not possible to represent fully all of the viewpoints held by our colleagues. Nor was it possible to produce a truly comprehensive review paper. Rather, this document is intended to be representative of the progress and prospects in the subfield of nuclear physics with electromagnetic probes. The authors apologize in advance to anyone whose work has been omitted or mis-referenced, and take full responsibility for the opinions expressed.
We begin by outlining the principal recommendations that we as a community would like to see NSAC include in the new Long Range Plan. Then we summarize the discussion in Sections 2-4 of this paper, presenting highlights of the progress since the 1989 Long Range Plan, and the outlook and prospects for the subfield.