Contact Us
EIC2@JLab Director:
Douglas Higinbotham
(757) 269-7851
Media Contact:
Lauren Hansen
Communications Manager
(757) 269-7689
lhansen@jlab.org
https://www.jlab.org/pressroom
EIC2@JLab Director:
Douglas Higinbotham
(757) 269-7851
Media Contact:
Lauren Hansen
Communications Manager
(757) 269-7689
lhansen@jlab.org
https://www.jlab.org/pressroom
The Electron-Ion Collider Center at Jefferson Lab (EIC2@JLab) is an organization to advance and promote the science program at a future electron-ion collider (EIC) facility. Particular emphasis is on the close connection of EIC science to the current Jefferson Lab 12 GeV CEBAF science program.
EIC2@JLab consolidates and connects the EIC physics and detector development activities in and around Jefferson Lab. These activities include:
Further, EIC2 coordinates with the following activities:
In addition, EIC2 establishes the following new activities:
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) is located at 12000 Jefferson Avenue in Newport News, Virginia.
Accelerate your career with a new role at the nation's newest national laboratory. Here you can be part of a team exploring the building blocks of matter and lay the ground work for scientific discoveries that will reshape our understanding of the atomic nucleus. Join a community with a common purpose of solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems of our time.
A career at Jefferson Lab is more than a job. You will be part of “big science” and work alongside top scientists and engineers from around the world unlocking the secrets of our visible universe. Managed by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC; Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is entering an exciting period of mission growth and is seeking new team members ready to apply their skills and passion to have an impact. You could call it work, or you could call it a mission. We call it a challenge. We do things that will change the world.
At Jefferson Lab we believe in giving back to our community and encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers. Our staff reaches out to students to advance awareness and appreciation of the range of research carried out within the DOE national laboratory system, to increase interest in STEM careers for women and minorities, and to encourage everyone to become a part of the next-generation STEM workforce. We are recognized for our innovative programs like:
1,500 students from 15 Title I schools engage in the Becoming Enthusiastic About Math and Science (BEAMS) program at the lab each school year.
60 teachers are enrolled in the Jefferson Science Associates Activities for Teachers (JSAT) program at the lab inspiring 9,000 students annually.
24 high school students have internships and 34 college students have mentorships at the lab.
Exploring the hidden world of quarks and gluons
Nobuo Sato has “crafted” a unique skillset to help him excel in his career. This DOE Early Career Award-winning nuclear physicist uses his skills as a computational scientist in the Center for Theoretical and Computational Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to explore the femtoscale world of quarks and gluons.
“One of the primary missions of the lab is to explore the inner core of matter,” Sato explains. “This is an expedition—a trip to the center of protons and neutrons, which are fundamental objects that everything we see is made of.”
Inside protons and neutrons, the team explores some of the smallest-known particles – the quarks that make up protons and neutrons and the gluons that bind those quarks together -- to embark on a deeper understanding of how they behave.
“Nature has its own code,” Sato says. “It’s known as the ‘Standard Model’ and within it there is the theory of strong interactions that controls everything we see. We have Jefferson Lab as a facility to study the current frontier of science, which allows us to probe the realm of quarks and gluons.”
By performing scattering experiments under various conditions, Sato and his team are able to infer how quarks and gluons respond to various stimuli. Cataloging these observations enhances science’s understanding of the Standard Model as it pertains to quarks and gluons.
Then, with enough data, Sato can connect the theory of strong interactions to observational data. By investigating this connection, scientists can learn about the intrinsic properties of nucleons and nuclei in terms of its elementary constituents.
Protons, neutrons require orchestrated effort to probe and capture
Sato and his theorist colleagues have devised clever methods to analyze data recorded by experimentalists about the slippery protons and neutrons.
“Part of the difficulty is that all of the matter inside the protons and neutrons can’t exist in isolation,” Sato explains. “The interior has to stay whole—as a ‘bound state.’ You can’t pull a quark out and have it stay stable. Once it is pulled out of the bound state, it becomes an ‘independent,’ which can only exist in a very tiny fraction of time.”
“As soon as you poke a proton or neutron with a probe, such as an electron beam, it becomes something else,” Sato says. “It follows that different outcomes can occur due to quantum mechanics.”
Indeed, this probing method is central to many of the lab’s experiments and requires concerted maneuvering to succeed.
“There is an entire industry around how we can probe protons, and everyone at the lab has a role,” says Sato. “The accelerator teams are doing an excellent job producing energetic electron beams, and the experimentalists collect data from scattering events.
“Then there’s an entire system for acquiring data, including experimentalists, who will work around-the-clock in shifts to get all the data needed. Those data are converted into maps that theorists like me can reverse-engineer into a visual depiction of quarks and gluons. It is very complicated stuff -- let’s say that,” Sato laughs.
While "the whole lab orchestrates and synchronizes to play together,” Sato notes that, “Theory comes first.
"An experiment starts with a theory,” he explains. “From there, we have a framework that allows us to make calculations. Combining those calculations with computer science, we can reverse-engineer the hidden world of quarks and gluons into observational data. We are mapping data to help visualize and observe the inner core of matter.”
Essential Tools: High-powered Microscopes
While an experiment may begin with a theory, assembling a toolkit is a critical early step.
“A proton is ten-to-the-minus-15 meters in size,” says Sato. “Quarks and gluons are even smaller than a proton. We can’t see them directly, because our eyes will be blind to them.”
In order to observe the smallest-known particles, “you have to have a particle accelerator, which is essentially a probe inward like a microscope,” explains Sato.
That is where Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility comes in. CEBAF is a DOE Office of Science user facility that enables the research of more than 1,900 nuclear physicists worldwide.
“One of our goals is to try to take pictures of the protons,” Sato says. “Just two decades ago, the field mostly relied on a one-dimensional picture. With the theoretical framework we now have, we are in a position to start to understand the full dimensionality of this realm.”
However, Sato notes, the “picture” he creates is not actually a picture, but rather a reconstruction made from observing behaviors and cataloging patterns in order to develop a projection of the characteristics of the subject.
In short, the subject Sato is trying to capture can only be “seen” by capturing its shadow from different angles and reconstructing the image with as much data as possible.
“We observe the reactions happening around the quarks and gluons in order to reverse-engineer an image—kind of like how we imagine the black hole,” Sato explains. “You can’t see a black hole directly, either, so to visualize it, you have to take a lot of data and try to reverse-engineer what a picture of the activity would really look like if we could see it.”
Support and mentoring for the big picture
Just as improving technology can further push the scientific frontier, Sato recognizes that supporting and mentoring other scientists can have an important impact on results—and he is eager for opportunities to engage.
“As part of the theory group, we give support to our experimental colleagues,” explains Sato. “Supporting physics is sharing theory. As a theoretical physicist, I work with experimentalists to design their experiments in ways that will help us optimize our time using the accelerator, so that we can get the quality of data we need to most accurately reconstruct the image we want.”
Sato also looks forward to mentoring—and learning from—a regular flow of postdoctoral students and interns.
“Part of mentoring younger scientists is to showcase the relationship between the theory realm and experimental realm,” Sato says.
“Our summer interns are undergraduate students who are interested in theoretical physics,” Sato explains. “We assign projects so we can train them and pave their way to work in this field. The skills they gain are big.
“I have a small bandwidth and having a group of people who works together helps us all,” he continues. “Students learn more about theory and a lot about computing and machine learning. They have hands-on computational activities with real science that can be applied.”
Sato’s goal when mentoring others is simple: “I want to give the opportunity to everyone who is interested in this field of study and to learn about the wonders of this microscopic hidden world of quarks and gluons.”
Outside of the lab, Sato says that he enjoys running.
“Running is one of my favorite outdoor activities,” Sato says. “I don’t like to compete. Running is a time when I can think about solutions to problems I’m working on. Some problems I solve when running. There’s an interesting dynamic between the two.”
Further Reading
Analyzing Matter’s Building Blocks
Theorist Takes Aim at the Makeup of Matter
Computing Takes the Prize
By Carrie Rogers
The Jefferson Lab campus is located in southeastern Virginia amidst a vibrant and growing technology community with deep historical roots that date back to the founding of our nation. Staff members can live on or near the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay region or find peace in the deeply wooded coastal plain. You will have easy access to nearby beaches, mountains, and all major metropolitan centers along the United States east coast.
To learn more about the region and its museums, wineries, parks, zoos and more, visit the Virginia tourism page, Virginia is for Lovers.
To learn more about life at Jefferson Lab, click here.
We support our inventors! The lab provides resources to employees for the development of patented technology -- with over 180 awarded to date! Those looking to obtain patent coverage for their newly developed technologies and inventions while working at the lab are supported and mentored by technology experts, from its discovery to its applied commercialization, including opportunities for monetary awards and royalty sharing. Learn more about our patents and technologies here.
"There is world-class research going on here. Any given day you can be in the room with genius physicists and that’s just amazing.”
“Here at the lab you get to see what you’ve worked on. You can hold it in your hands. It’s rewarding to know that you’ve played a part in helping the machine to be successful.”
"My own research enables me to better lead the Theory Center, to lead our collaboration, to provide good guidance to our junior researchers on the team, and to provide valuable input to the advisory and review committees that I serve"
“Generally, the mechanical engineers at the lab support the physicists. The physicists have the big ideas about how to support new science, and the engineers figure out how to make that happen.”
“Chemistry is the art of science and art; you’re manipulating and creating things. We have lots of different recipes to work with.”
Jefferson Science Associates, LLC manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Jefferson Science Associates/Jefferson Lab is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and does not discriminate in hiring or employment on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, or veteran status or on any other basis prohibited by federal, state, or local law.
If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please send an e-mail to recruiting @jlab.org or call (757) 269-7100 between 8 am – 5 pm EST to provide the nature of your request.
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JSA/Jefferson Lab values the skills, experience and expertise veterans can offer due to the myriad of experiences, skill sets and knowledge service members achieve during their years of service. The organization is committed to recruiting, hiring, training and retaining veterans, and its ongoing efforts has earned JSA/Jefferson Lab the Virginia Values Veterans (V3) certification, awarded by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN For 2024
The EIC Center at Jefferson Lab, EIC2, is pleased to announce opportunities for graduate and post-doctoral fellowships.
These fellowships will be awarded to fund coming to Jefferson Lab to research a special topic. The current areas of research include theory, simulations, detectors, and computing as they relate to the EIC, Positrons or the proposed JLab 22 GeV upgrade. Each fellowship will provide travel to Jefferson Lab, housing and a per diem for a typical stay of ten weeks at the lab.
Eligible students must be enrolled full-time in a relevant doctoral program. Postdocs must have a full-time position with a relevant university or laboratory research program. . The awardees may not concurrently hold another major full-time fellowship or internship. The award is limited to once a year though awardees can reapply for an additional year.
To apply, a research plan must be provided according to the guidance provided below. The plan should be written by the applicant together with their university or laboratory advisor. The plan should contain clear goals and deliverable to be accomplished by the end of the Fellowship visit. Working with a Jefferson Lab staff member is encouraged.
The applications will be evaluated on an ongoing basis according to the following criteria:
The following application will be reviewed on an rolling basis.
The application materials must be sent by email to Patricia Cheeseboro <pcheese@jlab.org>.
Inquiries about the fellowship program should be directed to: Douglas Higinbotham (doug@jlab.org)
Press releases about past winners of the program can be found at the following links: