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I owe a great debt to my advisor, Prof. Felix Boehm, not only for guiding me through this project and my studies at Caltech, but also for giviug me the opportunity to experience life in Switzerland while doing so. Invaluable guidance was also provided by Jean-Luc Vuilleumier, Kurt Gabathuler, Petr Vogel and Herb Henrikson, all of whom played irreplacable roles in completing this project. Else Garcia deserves special credit for always being there to handle the last minute difficulties and as well as the everyday ones. The other collaborators on this experiment played invaluable parts and they were Eric Bovet, Jean-Pierre Egger and Daniel Reusser .Thanks go to the institutions involved, Caltech, the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research and the Institute of Physics at the University of Neuchatel, for providing excellent support. Special thanks to my parents for patience and understanding and to friends on both sides of the Atlantic for making both work time and free time enjoyable. Also special thanks to Howard Stone and Louis Fluri for many interesting discussions and David Mellon and Frank Booth for providing many interesting diversions.Finally, sentiments I cannot express to Jane Ann Kincade who has been with me throughout and without whose patience and understanding I could not have completed this project. This thesis is dedicated to her. 1

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Absolute yields of K X-ray transitions in pionic hydrogen and deuterium were determined with accuracies of typically _ 10% at target pressures of 2.8, 15 and 40 bar and compared with the results of a recently developed cascade code.