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Since the first cyclotron beam fifty years ago, the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute has functioned as a university-based laboratory. Over the past two decades it has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the State of Texas, the Welch Foundation, and commercial sale of beam-time. The first accelerator is a conventional isochronous cyclotron modeled after the 88″ cyclotron at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It arose from a proposal funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the R. A. Welch Foundation (a private foundation headquartered in Houston), and the State of Texas and continued to operate from 1967 to 1987. After recommissioning in 2007 as a higher-field K150 machine, it is still in operation. The K500 cyclotron, funded in 1980 by the Welch Foundation and Texas A&M University and modeled after the Michigan State NSCL K500 cyclotron, is a superconducting isochronous cyclotron whose first beam was extracted in 1988.

Central to the Electroweak Standard Model is the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, a unitary 3 × 3 matrix that relates the weak- to the mass-eigenstates of the three generations of quarks. The Standard Model itself does not prescribe the values of the individual matrix elements—they must each be determined experimentally—but it does insist that the full matrix must satisfy all conditions of unitarity. Thus, any conclusive experimental demonstration that the unitarity conditions are not met would prove the need for “new physics” extending beyond the current Standard Model. Conversely, if the experiment were instead to confirm unitarity, this result would circumscribe the scope of any possible new physics to an extent limited only by the quoted experimental uncertainties on the unitarity sum. Either way, there is compelling motivation here for precision measurements of the CKM matrix elements aimed at the most demanding tests possible of the matrix's unitarity.

The distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) treatment for direct two-nucleon transfer reactions has been derived following the formalism of Satchler, spin-orbit coupling being included in the distorted wave expansions. Methods for the evaluation of the integrals involved are described, and in particular a discussion is given of two different ‘zero-range’ approximations, one involving an assumption that the heaviest projectile has zero extent, the other assuming the interaction to have zero range. These two approaches are compared. The main emphasis, however, is directed towards extracting from experimental two-nucleon transfer reactions, reliable spectroscopic information, and to this end, shell model expressions for the spectroscopic amplitude have been derived, together with closed formulae for two-particle coefficients of fractional parentage (cfp). The JT representation is used principally throughout, but expressions are given for the LSJT representation as well as for the separate treatment...