Jefferson Lab Begins Year Awarding Contracts to Start Work on $310 Million Upgrade
HallD drawing
Guy Ron is a teaching assistant and Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University and a Jefferson Lab user.

Jefferson Lab started 2009 by announcing the awarding of four contracts as part of the $310 million 12 GeV Upgrade Project that will provide physicists with a cutting-edge facility for studying the basic building blocks of the visible universe.

A Virginia Beach company was awarded a $14.1 million contract to construct a new experimental hall (Hall D) and supporting facilities that are part of the project.

Under the contract, announced Feb. 4, S.B. Ballard Construction Co. will build 20,000 square feet of new facilities. This will include Hall D, an 8,000-square-foot facility that will be Jefferson Lab’s fourth experimental hall; a 250-foot extension of the CEBAF underground accelerator tunnel; and new roads and utilities to support the new experimental hall. Construction is expected to start this spring with completion expected in late summer 2011.

In January, the lab awarded a contract worth $1.5 million to Ritchie-Curbow Construction Co. of Newport News for the construction of an addition to the Central Helium Liquefier building. The expanded building will house much of the equipment necessary to double the refrigeration for the upgraded accelerator.

Two additional contracts were awarded to vendors from Japan and Germany for materials required for the construction of particle detectors and related electronics for Hall D and the planned Glue Excitations Experiment, also known as Glue-X.

A contract worth $3.3 million was awarded to Kuraray Co. of Japan for nearly 2,000 miles of plastic scintillation fibers for a barrel calorimeter which is the largest detector planned for Hall D and the Glue-X experiment. The calorimeter will be 13 feet long, 6 feet in outer diameter and weigh more than 30 tons. It will detect and measure the positions and energies of photons produced in experiments. Its precision will allow physicists to reconstruct the details of individual particle's properties, motion and decay. Precise timing information on charged particles collected by the barrel calorimeter also will allow physicists to identify particles that have gone undetected (i.e. missing energies).

The final contract was awarded to Acam-Messelectronic GmbH of Germany, for 1,440 ultra-precise integrated time-to-digital converters needed to read out the signals from particles in the Hall D experiments. The contract is valued at about $200,000.

The contracts are the first of the 12 GeV Upgrade Project to be awarded since Jefferson Lab received approval from the Department of Energy in September to start construction – also known as Critical Decision Three, or CD-3. Under the project, funded by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the DOE Office of Science, the lab will double the energy of its accelerated electron beam from 6 billion electron volts (GeV) to 12 GeV and upgrade the equipment in its three existing experimental halls, as well as construct the new Hall D.