Electro-Weak Interactions in Light Nuclei

In this thesis, conducted in the field of few--body nuclear physics,I studied low energy inelastic reactions of electro--weak probes on light nuclei. Such interactions hold experimental and theoretical attention in recent years because of the role they play in various fields of physics, stretching from checking the standard model limits; through nuclear structure and dynamics research; up to microscopic interaction in astrophysical phenomena, such as supernova explosion and the nucleosynthesis of the elements. The reactions considered in this work are: (i) Neutrino interaction with A=3 and $^4$He nuclei, in energies typical to core-collapse supernova. For $^4$He both the neutral and charged current reactions were calculated, whereas only neutral current reactions are calculated for A=3 nuclei. (ii) Photoabsorption on $^4$He. This long standing problem has been the attraction of theoretical and experimental efforts in the last three decades. The calculations make use of two novel methods. the Lorentz Integral Transform (LIT) method, which is used to transform the scattering problem to a bound state like problem. The resulting equations are solved using the Effective Interaction in the Hyperspherical Harmonics (EIHH) method.