The first Ph.D. awarded to a physicist from CEBAF's experimental physics program won the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics Dissertation Award for 2000.

John Arrington was a Ph.D. candidate from Caltech when he came to the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility in 1994. He worked in Hall C and conducted the third experiment run in that hall before his departure in '96.

John Arrington takes a break before presenting his paper at the recent Physics Opportunities with 12 GeV workshop held here. Former Lab Program Advisory Committee member and chair, Brad Filippone, Caltech, was Arrington's advisor.

His experiment used the Lab's electron beam to examine the motion of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and modifications to their structure inside the nucleus. The award, announced earlier this month, cites Arrington "For his significant contributions to the preparation, execution and analysis of measurements of inclusive high-energy electron scattering from nuclei. Observations of scaling phenomena observed in these cross sections provide insight into the role of nucleonic and subnucleonic degrees-of-freedom in the short-range structure of nuclei."

During his first 2 1/2 years at the Lab, Arrington helped with the set up and development of Hall C - software, electronics, analysis - anything he could get involved in. "I worked on lots of different and interesting parts of the hall. It was great helping to set up different experiments, watching them run and contributing to the analysis afterward," Arrington said.

"Much of the reason I chose nuclear physics was due to the scale of the experiments. There are so many areas of involvement: equipment, software, planning, analysis... You can really take in the big picture, and CEBAF was a great place for me to do that. Being here and working on all parts of Hall C made this ideal work for me," he continued.

"I met a lot of great people here and I got to see lots of incredible physics. It's been great being able to follow the analysis of experiments, share ideas, discuss problems, and combine information from different experiments to get a greater understanding on the whole of what is coming out of the hall," he added.

The last several months of Arrington's stay at JLab included setting up his experiment and developing his run plan.

Arrington's drive, professionalism, capabilities and knowledge impressed many of the people he worked with here. "He joined us years before we started doing experiments," recalled Dave Mack, Hall C staff scientist. "He did a lot of work on Hall C's software, electronics and detectors. John was extremely effective; he functioned at the level of a staff member."

"We nominated him for the Physical Society award," Mack said, "not just for his experiment and dissertation, but for the software and procedure development work he did to help build up Hall C. He made a real contribution. John executed his experiment extremely well. He knew everything that was going on with it. His knowledge of the equipment and process was great. John really deserves this honor."

Arrington is now in a post doctoral fellowship position at Argonne National Lab. He attended the JLab Physics Opportunities with 12 GeV Electrons workshop January 13-15.

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