At the upcoming Joint Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) in Columbus, Ohio, the following news conference will take place in room B205 at the Columbus Convention Center.

The newsroom itself will be room B204, where the phone numbers are 614-722-1202 and -1203; the fax number is 614-722-1204. In addition, a general news release on the meeting as well as several lay language papers exists at our "Virtual Pressroom" website: www.aps.org/BAPSAPR98/vpr/.

NEWS CONFERENCE: The Size and Shape of the Deuteron. Sunday, April 19, 9:30 AM. Abdellah Ahmidouch, now at North Carolina A&T State University, (336-334-7646) and Betsy Beise of the University of Maryland (301-405-6109) will describe results from the t20 experiment at the Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia. This experiment has gained new information on the shape and size of the deuteron, a nucleus consisting of a proton and a neutron. While previous experiments have probed the size of the deuteron to only 0.5 Fermi, about half the size of a proton, this new experiment is the first to resolve details of the deuteron structure down to a fifth of the proton's size. Surprisingly enough and contrary to some theoretical predictions, this experiment shows that even at this small scale the deuteron can still be described perfectly well by "classical" nuclear physics as a system of a proton and a neutron loosely held together, without considering the fundamental building blocks of the particles, namely quarks and gluons. (Paper H12.04 at the meeting) Roger Carlini, Jefferson Lab.