One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is providing a complete
description of the structure of atomic nuclei. While mean-field calculations
provide detailed information on the nuclear shell structure for a wide range of
nuclei, they do not capture the complete structure of nuclei, in particular the
impact of small, dense structures in nuclei. The strong, short-range component
of the nucleon-nucleon potential yields hard interactions between nucleons
which are close together, generating a high-momentum tail to the nucleon
momentum distribution, with momenta well in excess of the Fermi momentum. This
high-momentum component of the nuclear wave-function is one of the most poorly
understood parts of nuclear structure.
Utilizing high-energy probes, we can isolate scattering from high-momentum
nucleons, and use these measurements to examine the structure and impact of
short-range nucleon-nucleon correlations. Over the last decade we have moved
from looking for evidence of such short-range structures to mapping out their
strength in nuclei and examining their isospin structure. This has been made
possible by high-luminosity and high-energy accelerators, coupled with an
improved understanding of the reaction mechanism issues involved in studying
these structures. We review the general issues related to short-range
correlations, survey recent experiments aimed at probing these short-range
structures, and lay out future possibilities to further these studies.Comment: Review article to appear in Prog.Part.Nucl.Phys. 77 pages, 33 figure
