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Simona Malace, a staff scientist at Jefferson Lab, likes to refer to protons and neutrons as “tiny laboratories” that enable her studies of the heart of matter. For decades, physicists like Malace have probed protons and neutrons, particles known collectively as nucleons, to study the strong interaction. The strong interaction holds most ordinary matter together: it binds protons and neutrons to form the atomic nucleus, and smaller particles called quarks to form nucleons themselves. It’s one of the four fundamental interactions. “The universe we are moving in is governed by these interactions,” says Malace. “So knowing about them is like knowing about the world around you.”

Ted Rogers will apply his 2017 DOE Early Career Award to extend the theory that enables more detailed understanding of quark movement in the proton. One of the major challenges of exploring the inner space of the proton is figuring out how to study the behavior of objects that you can’t access directly. Now, Ted Rogers has received a 2017 Early Career Research Program award from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to do just that.

Thousands of Virginia students are expected to flock to Jefferson Lab's Science Education website in the coming weeks – just as they have done each spring for the past several years – as they prepare for the Virginia Standards of Learning examinations. Jefferson Lab’s website hosts the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) Science and Math Practice Tests. Categories include the Math tests for grades 2 - 8, Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry, and the Science tests for grades 3, 5 and 8, Biology, Chemistry, and Earth Science. The SOL practice tests include SOL questions and answers provided by the Virginia Department of Education – from as recent as spring 2015, and going back to 2000.

Much like two friendly neighbors getting together to chat over a cup of coffee, the minuscule particles in our sub-atomic world also come together to engage in a kind of conversation. Now, nuclear scientists are developing tools to allow them to listen in on the particles’ gab fests and learn more about how they stick together to build our visible universe. Jozef Dudek is a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Jefferson Lab and an assistant professor of physics at the College of William & Mary. He and his colleagues recently carried out the first complex calculations of a particle called the sigma and published the result in Physical Review Letters in January.

Cumulative Time Worked Represents Nearly 2,100 Years of Service to Lab One hundred thirty-six staff members were recognized for their years at Jefferson Lab during a series of four 2017 Service Awards events held in early February. Jefferson Lab staff members who had achieved 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-, 25- and 30-year employment anniversaries were recognized at the events, according to Krystina Patrick, administrative assistant for Human Resources.

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – To help raise awareness of the need for digital literacy, volunteers from Jefferson Lab’s Information Technology Division and Science Education staff joined forces in December to provide more than 60 local students with the opportunity to experience basic computer programming. Two classes of fifth-grade students from Carver Elementary School – participating in Jefferson Lab’s BEAMS program – were invited to participate in the lab’s Hour of Code campaign during the 2016 Computer Science Education Week. The purpose of the campaign is to encourage students, and their parents and teachers to participate in and to learn more about computer programming and the many career opportunities in the field of computer science.

While next-generation supercomputers are expected to arrive in the next decade, scientists will need to spend considerable time in preparations to make the most of the future machines’ capabilities. Now, Jefferson Lab scientists have been awarded $2.1 million as part of a multi-institutional project sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to prepare for this next major leap in computing capability. The “Exascale Lattice Gauge Theory Opportunities and Requirements for Nuclear and High Energy Physics” project also includes researchers from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Boston University, Brookhaven National Lab, the University of Illinois, Columbia University, the University of Utah, Stony Brook and the University of Edinburgh.

While in seventh grade growing up in what is now Uzbekistan, Anatoly Radyushkin’s uncle suggested that he study physics. The young Anatoly took up his uncle’s suggestion and before long was devouring physics textbooks. Radyushkin quickly realized he wanted one day to work in a field where he could make discoveries.

As a result of Jefferson Lab staff, users and subcontractors' dedication and attention to safety, Jefferson Science Associates/Jefferson Lab recently earned two awards from the National Safety Council. The lab received the Perfect Record Award for operating from Nov. 1, 2014 to Dec. 31, 2015, without incurring an occupational injury or illness involving days away from work. That period accounted for 1,449,956 work hours. The award recognizes companies or facilities “that have completed a period of at least 12 consecutive months without incurring an occupational injury or illness that resulted in days away from work or death.”

More than 12,000 people took advantage of the opportunity to attend Jefferson Lab’s “New Era of Science” Open House on April 30, 2016. The record-breaking turn out for a Jefferson Lab open house occurred despite cool temperatures and overcast skies. Assisted by more than 450 volunteers, visitors explored nearly all of the major facilities at the lab, including the CEBAF accelerator, three of the lab’s four experimental halls, the Low Energy Recirculator Facility, the Superconducting Radiofrequency Institute and the Data Center.

Diamonds are one of the most coveted gemstones. But while some may want the perfect diamond for its sparkle, physicists covet the right diamonds to perfect their experiments. The gem is a key component in a novel system that enables precision measurements that could lead to the discovery of new physics in the sub-atomic realm — the domain of the particles and forces that build the nucleus of the atom. Explorations of this realm require unique probes with just the right characteristics, such as the electrons that are prepared for experiments inside the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Lab.

http://www.science.energy.govWaverly Gorman didn’t always want to study physics. She began her college career as a mechanical engineering major. Then she took a class on quantum mechanics, and she was hooked. Now, the 21-year-old New Mexico State University junior is the latest recipient of the Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Minority/Female Undergraduate Research Assistantship (MFURA) at Jefferson Lab.

Hugh Montgomery, Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, announced today that he will resign his position after over seven years at the helm of the research facility.  He will also step down as the President and CEO of Jefferson Science Associates (JSA), a joint venture between the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and PAE. JSA is the management and operating contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility.

Optical fiber networks carry the lifeblood of research facilities like Jefferson Lab. Bundles of these thin glass, fiber or plastic lines transmit vast amounts of information and data, coded into beams of light and traveling nearly as quickly. The lab’s original optical fiber network, installed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was built to transmit data from CEBAF’s (then) three experimental halls and for high-speed Internet connectivity. Over the years, many of the lab’s infrastructure and utilities systems were also moved onto the fiber optic network; and it now carries operational data for everything from telecommunications and email to security and heating, ventilation and cooling.

To raise awareness of the need for digital literacy and a basic understanding of computer science, Jefferson Lab’s Information Technology Division and Science Education staff are encouraging teachers, students and their parents to participate in the “Hour of Code” campaign during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 7-13, and throughout the year. A coalition of technology leaders, businesses, organizations and academic institutions developed the Hour of Code campaign through a public nonprofit (Code.org), which is dedicated to “expanding participation in computer science by making it available in more schools and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color.”

He missed the 'glitzy Oscars for science,' but that’s OK with Bob McKeown. McKeown is the Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor in William & Mary’s physics department as well as deputy director for science at Jefferson Lab. He was a participant in two of five experiments that share the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Amber Boehnlein can’t remember a time when she didn’t love science. As a child, growing up in the small Ohio village of Germantown, Boehnlein (pronounced “Bane Line”) would often play math games with her grandmother. She taught herself how to code while in high school. When she went off to college, it was only natural that she chose to study physics.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has announced that its LHCb experiment has discovered two possible pentaquark particles that haven't been seen before. If confirmed, these new particles will herald the discovery of a whole new class of particles. Pentaquarks gained international attention in 2003, when evidence for a lighter cousin of the pentaquarks announced by CERN was thought to have been found by experimenters at SPring-8 in Japan, the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in the Russian Federation and the ELectron Stretcher and Accelerator (ELSA) in Germany.

Fans of science and science fiction have been warned that mixing matter with anti-matter can yield explosive results. And that’s just what physicists were counting on, in hopes of blowing wide open a puzzle that has confounded them for the last decade. The puzzle comes from experiments that aimed to determine how quarks, the building blocks of the proton, are arranged inside that particle. That information is locked inside a quantity that scientists refer to as the proton’s electric form factor. The electric form factor describes the spatial distribution of the quarks inside the proton by mapping the charge that the quarks carry.

For as long as Matthew Burton can remember, he has been into science. When asked how far back, he readily recalls trying to bend a laser with magnets for an elementary school science fair project. The young researcher has always been excited by technology, and physics, he says, gave him a path into that. After high school, he headed to James Madison University on a (science, technology, engineering and math) STEM scholarship to study fundamental physics, and then to The College of William and Mary for its Ph.D. physics program.