The instrumentation in Hall A at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility was designed to study electro-and photo-induced reactions at very high luminosity and good momentum and angular resolution for at least one of the reaction products. The central components of Hall A are two identical high resolution spectrometers, which allow the vertical drift chambers in the focal plane to provide a momentum resolution of better than 2 x 10(-4). A variety of Cherenkov counters, scintillators and lead-glass calorimeters provide excellent particle identification. The facility has been operated successfully at a luminosity well in excess of 10(38) CM-2 s(-1). The research program is aimed at a variety of subjects, including nucleon structure functions, nucleon form factors and properties of the nuclear medium. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Results are reported from the HERMES experiment at HERA on a measurement of the neutron spin structure function ~(x, Q2) in deep inelastic scattering using 27.5 GeV longitudinally polarized positrons incident on a polarized 3He internal gas target. The data cover the kinematic range 0.023 < x < 0.6 and 1 (GeV/c) 2 < Q2 < 15 (GeV/c) 2. The integral fo~i0623 ~(x) dx evaluated at a fixed Qz of 2.5 (GeV/c) 2 is-0.0344-0.013(stat.)+0.005(syst.). Assuming Regge behavior at low x, the first moment F'~ = fl ~(x)dx is-0.037 ± 0.013(stat.)±0.005(syst.)±0.006(extrapol.

We report on precision measurements of the elastic cross section for electron-proton scattering performed in Hall C at Jefferson Lab. The measurements were made at 28 distinct kinematic settings covering a range in momentum transfer of 0.4 < Q 2 < 5.5 (GeV/c) 2 . These measurements represent a significant contribution to the world's cross section data set in the Q 2 range where a large discrepancy currently exists between the ratio of electric to magnetic proton form factors extracted from previous cross section measurements and that recently measured via polarization transfer in Hall A at Jefferson Lab. This data set shows good agreement with previous cross section measurements, indicating that if a here-to-fore unknown systematic error does exist in the cross section measurements then it is intrinsic to all such measurements.

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