Jefferson Lab's Journey into the Nucleus
The year 1969 saw the publication of the first results indicating that hard scattering centres exist deep inside protons. A collaboration between the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was using SLAC's new high-energy electron LINAC to pioneer a rich new field in the study of the nucleus--deep inelastic scattering. Their measurements revealed that nucleons are made up of point-like particles, which Richard Feynman dubbed ''partons''. Thirty-five years on, studies of the parton-nature of the nucleus continue, not only at the traditional high-energy centres, but also at lower-energy laboratories, and in particular at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) in Virginia. Jefferson Lab is home to the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). Its main mission is to explore the atomic nucleus and the fundamental building-blocks of matter. As part of this mission, researchers there study the transition from the picture of the nucleus as a bound state of neutrons and protons to its deeper structure in terms of quarks and gluons--in other words, the transition from the hadronic degrees of freedom of nuclear physics to the quark-gluon degrees of freedom of high-energy physics. In exploring this transition, a wide range of experiments has been performed, from measurements of elastic form factors at large momentum transfers to studies of deep inelastic scattering. An array of spectrometers together with electron-beam energies of up to 5.7 GeV has allowed the laboratory to make significant contributions to this field. This article describes three experiments, each aimed at improving our understanding of a different aspect of the partonic nature of matter. The first, a classic deep inelastic scattering experiment, seeks to further our understanding of the composition of nucleon spin. The second experiment studies the concept of quark-hadron duality--a link between the deep inelastic region and the resonance region. The third experiment uses the atomic nucleus as a laboratory to improve understanding of the propagation and hadronization of quarks. Jefferson Lab's ability to perform this range of measurements is illustrated by the plot from the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) shown on the cover of this magazine, where the hadronic resonance peaks are seen to be washed out as one goes from the delta resonance around 1.2 GeV to higher invariant masses and into the deep inelastic scattering realm of quarks and gluons.
- Research Organization:
- Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), Newport News, VA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research (ER) (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-84ER40150
- OSTI ID:
- 834522
- Report Number(s):
- JLAB-PHY-04-298; DOE/ER/40150-2970; TRN: US0407215
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Submitted to CERN Courier, December 2004; PBD: 1 Nov 2004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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