The CEBAF large acceptance spectrometer (CLAS) is used to study photo- and electro-induced nuclear and hadronic reactions by providing efficient detection of neutral and charged particles over a good fraction of the full solid angle. A collaboration of about 30 institutions has designed, assembled, and commissioned CLAS in Hall B at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The CLAS detector is based on a novel six-coil toroidal magnet which provides a largely azimuthal field distribution. Trajectory reconstruction using drift chambers results in a momentum resolution of 0.5% at forward angles. Cherenkov counters, time-of-flight scintillators, and electromagnetic calorimeters provide good particle identification. Fast triggering and high data-acquisition rates allow operation at a luminosity of View the MathML source. These capabilities are being used in a broad experimental program to study the structure and interactions of mesons, nucleons, and nuclei using polarized and unpolarized electron and photon beams and targets. This paper is a comprehensive and general description of the design, construction and performance of CLAS

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We present a new high-statistics measurement of the cross section for the process e+e~e+e m. +m at a center-of-mass energy of 29 GeV for invariant pion-pair masses M(m+m ) between 350 MeV/c' and 1.6 GeV/c2. We observe the f~( 1270) and measure its radiative width to be 3. 15+0.0420. 39 keV. We also observe an enhancement in the~+~spectrum near 1 GeV. General agreement is found with unitarized models of the yy~m m. reaction that include finalstate interactions.