image: Jefferson Lab announces its newest slate of projects to receive Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) program funding for 2025. In its 12th year, the LDRD program will split $3 million among 13 different projects. Here, principal investigators in the lab's FY24 program share the results of their projects in a poster session.
Credit: Jefferson Lab/Aileen Devlin
NEWPORT NEWS, VA – “What If?” is more than a comic book storyline: It’s one of the most important questions that a scientist can explore. But often, the what if questions may seem too tangential, too grandiose, or too pie in the sky to spend time and money on, when there are so many other pressing research priorities with nearer-term payoffs.
To ensure such questions get a chance at gaining answers, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility reserves funds in its Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) program to see such projects through.
“We want to make sure that we're positioned to answer the call for future DOE mission requirements, and so that's part of our investment in the LDRD. The other is that we want to foster the creativity and the exploration of the forefronts of science and technology,” said Jefferson Lab Director Kimberly Sawyer in making the announcement.
Now, Jefferson Lab leadership has just announced the newest slate of projects to receive funding for 2025. In its 12th year, the LDRD program will split $3 million among 13 different projects that require the ingenuity and expertise demonstrated by Jefferson Lab staff members.
In introducing the projects, Jefferson Lab’s deputy director for science, David Dean, described the selection process.
“Selecting these projects is a rigorous exercise. You have people on a committee who actually look at all these proposals in the first round of review. And then, in the second round, we spend the whole eight hours together and talk through the proposals to make sure we have the best grouping we can have,” he said.
Of the funded projects, six are related to the lab’s experimental and theoretical nuclear physics mission focus and include projects that will use artificial intelligence and neural networks in data analysis and explore next-generation detector technologies.
Another five projects are related to particle accelerator science and range from projects that may lay the groundwork to enable future upgrades of the lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility to one that will use a robot to eliminate contamination of particle accelerator parts in the manufacturing process.
Finally, two more projects in computational science will enable early test beds of technologies to explore high speed data sharing and processing.
Each of these projects will be overseen by Jefferson Lab’s LDRD program director, Latifa Elouadhriri. She will ensure the project leads are best positioned to see their projects through to completion throughout the year.
Science has a long tradition of big payoffs for answering questions, big or small. “What if I tie a key to this string?” and “What if I aim alpha particles at a gold foil?” and “What if I cross-pollinate different pea plants?” have all led to huge discoveries that continue to benefit humankind.
But answering each of these scientific questions came with risks. For instance, the resources used in attempts to answer these “What if?” questions meant that those resources wouldn’t be available for other opportunities. Alternatively, not dedicating resources to answer such questions means that society would not have moved forward as quickly in these fields and would not now have the benefits that came from such research.
“Everybody talks about risk these days, and so LDRD is a mechanism that we can use to actually understand and buy down some of the high risk of our highly exploratory R&D efforts,” Sawyer said. “We need to make sure that we have a proving ground for R&D, and we do that with our LDRD.”
Further Reading – Previous LDRD Project Outcomes
Mapping Out Matter’s Building Blocks in 3D
Steering Electrons Out of the Drift with Deep Learning
Counting Photons for Quantum Computing
California Streamin’: Jefferson Lab, ESnet Achieve Coast-to-Coast Feed of Real-Time Physics Data
Accelerating the Future
Project Sets Focus on Polarized Positrons for Research
Contact: Kandice Carter, Jefferson Lab Communications Office, kcarter@jlab.org
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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https:// energy.gov/science.