Public Affairs
Special Events
Jefferson Lab is the site of many special events during the course of a year including Lab hosted nuclear physics conferences and colloquia. The Public Affairs Office is responsible for coordinating logistics such as the protocol, publicity, press releases, media contacts, tours, special displays and photography.
Jefferson Lab hosts a biennial Open House. The Open House highlights the latest physics research and technology developments underway at Jefferson Lab. The event is free of charge, and open to the general public. The next Open House is being planned for spring, 2005. A portion of every major area of the Lab will be open. Visitors will be able to enter a section of the accelerator (25-feet underground), one or two of the experimental halls, the Free-Electron Laser, the Computer Center, the accelerator assembly area, and learn about technology transfer at the Lab, including state-of-art detectors for medical imaging. The Open House event includes a variety of hands-on and science education-oriented activities for children and adults. In addition to Jefferson Lab staff, NASA, Virginia Air & Space, and regional and local museums provide hands-on educational activities.
Also on an every-other-year basis (on the off year from the Open House) Jefferson Lab participates in the science and math education initiatives held in the Technology Building at the Virginia State Fair. Physicists, engineers, and educators from Jefferson Lab provide hands-on science and math education activities. Children and adults discover the wonders of cryogenics as scientists and technologists from Jefferson Lab demonstrate what happens when you cool objects with liquid nitrogen. They share with the audience one of the many technologies needed by the basic physics research laboratory, to conduct experiments on quarks and gluons, the bits of matter that make up protons and neutrons found in the nucleus of each atom.