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To study the structure of the nucleus of the atom, DOE's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility develops and employs a wide range of cutting-edge detector technologies. Now, Jefferson Lab scientists have used their expertise to build a small animal medical imager that's helping researchers develop a new gene therapy technique for cystic fibrosis.

Underwritten by the U.S. Army and in collaboration with the University of Florida, the Jefferson Lab Detector Group is beginning development of a compact heart imager that can be quickly deployed and easily moved between such hospital areas as emergency departments and intensive care units. The Group will build and test the heart imager in stages, and although the work has only recently begun, the eventual practical results could prove dramatic.

The experiment, titled "Quark Propagation through Cold QCD Matter," probed Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a fundamental theory of particle physics that describes the interactions of the basic building blocks of matter -- quarks and gluons. The energy the struck quark absorbs in the collision not only knocks the quark out of the particle it was bound within, it also creates new quarks and gluons.

To recognize and review the accomplishments of Jefferson Lab, the JLab User Group Board of Directors organized the symposium which was held June 11-13, 2003 and dedicated to the memory of Nathan Isgur, Jefferson Lab's first Chief Scientist. The meeting was divided into eight topics: nucleon form factors, few-body physics, reactions involving nuclei, strangeness production, structure functions, parity violation, deep exclusive reactions, and hadron spectroscopy. Each topic was presented by one experimentalist and one theorist.

Anatoly Radyushkin, a jointly-appointed physics professor at Old Dominion University and senior scientist at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has been named a Virginia Outstanding Scientist of 2004 for his work on the theory of generalized parton distributions.

The Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is pleased to announce that Dr. Anthony Thomas has accepted the position of Chief Scientist and Head of the Theory Group at Jefferson Lab.

The structure of the proton is under the microscope at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) in Newport News, Virginia, where a series of experiments continues to produce unexpected results.

A recent physics experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) in Newport News, Va., set what may well be a new record for accelerator physics: the most female scientists on an experiment.

Experiments in photochemistry and atomic physics will become possible, as should a series of advanced industrial applications, due to Jefferson Labs 10 kW upgrade to the FEL. "Calling it an upgrade is a bit of a misnomer," says FEL program manager Fred Dylla. "We've changed 90 percent of the hardware in the machine. We've gone beyond just tweaking. This is a significantly new machine."

Results of an international research collaboration have yielded convincing evidence of a subatomic particle consisting of five quarks. The results of the research--conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility--were announced at the Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics in May 2003.