NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – A Virginia Beach company has been awarded a $14.1 million contract to construct a new experimental hall and supporting facilities at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
The contract to S.B. Ballard Construction Co. was announced today and is part of a $310 million upgrade project at Jefferson Lab that will provide an international community of physicists with a cutting-edge facility for studying the basic building blocks of the visible universe.
Under the contract, Ballard 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 Jefferson Lab’s 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.
Jefferson Lab is a world-leading nuclear physics research laboratory devoted to the study of the building blocks of matter – quarks and gluons. The upgrade will double the energy of the lab’s electron beam from 6 billion electron volts (GeV) to 12 GeV and enable scientists to address one of the great mysteries of modern physics: Why are there no single quarks?