Welcome to the Experiments at the Mainz Mictroton MAMI

The physical program of the A1 collaboration with its 50 members from 20 countries is focused on hadron structure. The spectrometer setup is well suited to explore fundamental properties of the nucleon, for example, charge distributions by elastic form factor measurements and generalized polarizabilities by virtual Compton scatterig. Meson production gives access to the resonance structure of the nucleon and meson properties.

A photon incident on a nucleon couples to the nucleon electromagnetic current causing it to radiate mesons if the photon energy is sufficiently high. Such reactions induced by circularly and linearly polarized real photons up to energies of 1.5 GeV are being studied by the international A2 collaboration at MAMI.

The atomic nucleus is a bound state of protons and neutrons (so called nucleons). The A4 collaboration is investigating the structure of these nucleons. In a simple picture, nucleons are made up of three elementary constituents, two up- and one down-quark. Today's view of the nucleon is more complex: Beside the valence quarks also gluons, the force carrier of QCD, and quark-antiquark pairs known as sea quarks contribute to the properties of proton and neutron. In the quark sea also flavors occur which are not present in the valence quarks. The A4 collaboration is aiming to measure such flavor contribution, especially those of the strange quarks since they are the lightest non-valence quarks.

The X1 collaboration develops at MAMI brilliant novel radiation sources, and explores their potential for applications. The electromagnetic spectrum extends from the far-infrared into the hard X-ray range.