News Release

Four to beam up

Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility delivers beam to all four of its experimental areas simultaneously

Business Announcement

DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

CEBAF Delivers Electron Beams to All Four of Its Experimental Halls Simultaneously

image: The cylindrical devices seen here, called separators, are just one of several technological advances that allow CEBAF to simultaneously deliver electron beams to its four different experimental halls. view more 

Credit: DOE's Jefferson Lab

delivered its next technological success: For the first time, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) has delivered electron beams simultaneously to all four experimental halls. This achievement maximizes the amount of research that can be accomplished during run times and paves the way for the next era of ground-breaking experiments at the lab.

In September, Jefferson Lab officially completed the $338 million construction project to upgrade CEBAF's research capabilities from 6 GeV to 12 GeV and add a new experimental hall. Originally, the laboratory envisioned delivering electron beams to up to three of its four experimental halls simultaneously upon completion of the upgrade.

It wasn't thought to be technologically feasible to provide beam to all four halls, however while the upgrade was in progress Jefferson Lab staff made technological advances in equipment and accelerator capability, opening the door to providing additional research capacity.

On Jan. 12 at 8:04 p.m., CEBAF began delivering beam to all four experimental areas.

According to Rolf Ent, Jefferson Lab's Associate Director for Experimental Nuclear Physics, the accomplishment opens the possibility of CEBAF, an Office of Science User Facility, to deliver electron beams for an even richer program of study for its more than 1,500 Users worldwide.

"This means that we can now study four different topics in nuclear physics simultaneously," said Ent. "Being able to run experiments in all four halls at the same time allows us much more flexibility in scheduling experiments to maximize the research we can accomplish. Now, by smart scheduling and operation, we can gain at least 25 percent more in physics output, and possibly more!"

Jefferson Lab is a world-leading nuclear physics research laboratory devoted to the study of the building blocks of matter inside the atom's nucleus - quarks and gluons - that make up 99 percent of the mass of our visible universe.

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Contact: Kandice Carter, Jefferson Lab Communications Office, 757-269-7263, kcarter@jlab.org

Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, a joint venture of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. and PAE, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Jefferson Lab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The 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, please visit science.energy.gov.


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