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

The ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton G(E(p))/G(M(p)), which is an image of its charge and magnetization distributions, was measured at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) using the recoil polarization technique. The ratio of the form factors is directly proportional to the ratio of the transverse to longitudinal components of the polarization of the recoil proton in the elastic e(-->)p---> e(-->)p reaction. The new data presented span the range 3.5< Q(2)< 5.6 GeV(2) and are well described by a linear Q(2) fit. Also, the ratio sqrt[Q(2)] F(2(p))/F(1(p)) reaches a constant value above Q(2) = 2 GeV(2).

We report on the first measurement of the spin-dependent structure function g1d of the deuteron in the deep inelastic scattering of polarised muons off polarised deuterons, in the kinematical range 0.006

Precise measurements of the proton electromagnetic form factor ratio R = µpG p E /G p M using the polarization transfer method at Jefferson Lab have revolutionized the understanding of nucleon structure by revealing the strong decrease of R with momentum transfer Q 2 for Q 2 1 GeV 2 , in strong disagreement with previous extractions of R from cross section measurements. In particular, the polarization transfer results have exposed the limits of applicability of the one-photon-exchange approximation and highlighted the role of quark orbital angular momentum in the nucleon structure. The GEp-II experiment in Jefferson Lab's Hall A measured R at four Q 2 values in the range 3.5 GeV 2 ≤ Q 2 ≤ 5.6 GeV 2 . A possible discrepancy between the originally published GEp-II results and more recent measurements at higher Q 2 motivated a new analysis of the GEp-II data. This article presents the final results of the GEp-II experiment, including details of the new analysis, an expanded description of the apparatus and an overview of theoretical progress since the original publication. The key result of the final analysis is a systematic increase in the results for R, improving the consistency of the polarization transfer data in the high-Q 2 region. This increase is the result of an improved selection of elastic events which largely removes the systematic effect of the inelastic contamination, underestimated by the original analysis. * Corresponding author: puckett@jlab.org 2

We present the final results of the spin asymmetries A 1 and the spin structure functions g 1 of the proton and the deuteron in the kinematic range 0.0008ϽxϽ0.7 and 0.2ϽQ 2 Ͻ100 GeV 2 . For the determination of A 1 , in addition to the usual method which employs inclusive scattering events and includes a large radiative background at low x, we use a new method which minimizes the radiative background by selecting events with at least one hadron as well as a muon in the final state. We find that this hadron method gives smaller errors for xϽ0.02, so it is combined with the usual method to provide the optimal set of results.