The first publication from E99-006 resulted in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that focussed on the spin transfer from a longitudinally polarized electron beam to the Lambda hyperon produced in the exclusive p(pol(e),e'K⁺)pol(Lambda) reaction within the nucleon resonance region (W < 2.2 GeV). Understanding nucleon resonance excitation continues to provide a major challenge to hadronic physics due to the non-perturbative nature of QCD at these energies. Studies of strange final states have the potential to uncover baryonic resonances that do not couple or couple only weakly to the pi-N channel due to the different hadronic vertices involved. They are also expected to provide complementary information to multi-pion analyses.

Alternatively, these data provide potential insight into the nature of quark-pair production. There is a growing body of evidence that the appropriate degrees of freedom to describe the phenomenology of hadronic decays are constituent quarks held together by a gluonic flux-tube. The non-perturbative nature of the flux-tube gives rise to the well-known linear potential of heavy-quark confinement. Other properties of the flux-tube can be determined by studying quark-antiquark pair production, since this is widely believed to produce the color field neutralization that actually breaks the flux-tube. We argue that the spin properties of the quark-pair creation operator can explain the observed trends in the Lambda polarization. We conclude that the relevant quark-pair creation operator dominating our reaction has spin S=0 properties. This has important implications since many, if not most, calculations of hadronic spectroscopy assume a spin S=1 operator to calculate the transition to the final-state particles. These ideas have been covered in featured articles in two sources:

	CERN Courier (Volume 43, Number 5, June 2003)
	JLab On-Target Newsletter (June 2003).

The reference for the published Physical Review Letters article is given by:

D.S. Carman et al., (CLAS Collaboration), ``First Measurement of Transferred Polarization in the Exclusive pol(e) p --> e' K⁺ pol() Reaction", Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 131804 (2003).