Where the Lab Stands Now

As scientific knowledge expands, the dynamic process of discovering nature's secrets evolves. New knowledge leads to new scientific questions. Answering them requires new or upgraded research tools - and new relationships with vital constituencies outside the lab. This takes planning. That's the challenge for Jefferson Lab's Institutional Plan.

By performing extremely well, the accelerator and experimental hall equipment have been pushing this dynamic process:

• The accelerator routinely provides nearly 6 GeV (6 billion electron volts), 150% of the originally planned energy. So some experiments yield even better research data, since higher energy means sharper views into nuclei. And some experiments take less time, making way sooner for others.
• The accelerator also exceeds 1999 goals for serving more than one experimental hall. At 75% availability and 2.4 average hall multiplicity, operation for physics is highly efficient.
• A particularly demanding requirement is beam polarization - orienting the spin of the beam's electrons in one sharply defined direction. Polarization helps reveal key aspects of nuclear structure. The accelerator provides an unprecedented 50 microamperes of current at 80% polarization.
• With unmatched precision and power, the spectrometers and detectors are generating remarkable new data. Each operating day, the ultra-high-speed data-acquisition equipment sorts and channels a half terabyte - a half-million megabytes of information.

In 1999 Jefferson Lab's user community - physicists worldwide with interests in the research program - grew to over 1600, representing 280 institutions in 36 countries. Working in large, collaborative, multi-institutional groups, over half are awaiting assignments of beam time to carry out their already-approved experiments. All are counting on CEBAF's demonstrated capabilities and productivity.

Many currently envisioned experiments will be conducted in the coming several years - the first generation of CEBAF science.

What then?

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