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

We report the first results of the beam-spin asymmetry measured in the reaction e⃗p→epγ at a beam energy of 4.25 GeV. A large asymmetry with a sinφ modulation is observed, as predicted for the interference term of deeply virtual compton scattering (DVCS) and the Bethe-Heitler process. The amplitude of this modulation is α = 0.202±0.028. In leading-order and leading-twist perturbative QCD, the α is directly proportional to the imaginary part of the DVCS amplitude

The ratios of inclusive electron scattering cross sections of 4 He, 12 C, and 56 Fe to 3 He have been measured for the first time. It is shown that these ratios are independent of x B at Q 2 Ͼ1.4 GeV 2 for x B Ͼ1.5, where the inclusive cross section depends primarily on the high momentum components of the nuclear wave function. The observed scaling shows that the momentum distributions at high-momenta have the same shape for all nuclei and differ only by a scale factor. The observed onset of the scaling at Q 2 Ͼ1.4 GeV 2 and x B Ͼ1.5 is consistent with the kinematical expectation that two-nucleon short range correlations ͑SRC͒ dominate the nuclear wave function at p m տ300 MeV/c. The values of these ratios in the scaling region can be related to the relative probabilities of SRC in nuclei with Aу3. Our data, combined with calculations and other measurements of the 3 He/deuterium ratio, demonstrate that for nuclei with Aу12 these probabilities are 4.9-5.9 times larger than in deuterium, while for 4 He it is larger by a factor of about 3.8.

The cross section for the reaction ep-->e(')ppi(+)pi(-) was measured in the resonance region for 1.4