Pi Meson Scattering.

The research program described here has as its goal the investigation of pion-nucleus reactions at low energies in order to study the pion-nucleus reaction mechanism and to study nuclear properties which are particularly enhanced by the pion projectile. Low incident energies have been chosen in order to decrease the influence of the very strong P33 resonance thereby increasing the effective mean-free path of the pion in nuclear matter and allowing the data to be analyzed with perturbation techniques. The present program involves four major categories of pion reactions 1 pion absorption on the deuteron pion d yields p p at energies below 100 MeV 2 pion-elastic scattering at energies below 60 MeV 3 pion-inelastic scattering at energies below 60 MeV and 4 pion-double charge exchange.