Just a "Neighborhood, World-Class Accelerator Facility"
May 7, 2018
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (known as Jefferson Lab) celebrated a significant milestone last week, and among the list of dedication event speakers—including congressmen and federal department dignitaries—was UT Physics Assistant Professor Nadia Fomin.
The upgrade to the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) was a $338 million initiative that began in 2004 and was completed last year, on time and on budget. To mark this achievement, the facility held a dedication event on May 2. Representatives from the Department of Energy spoke (Jefferson Lab is a DOE facility), as did the city manager of Newport News, Virginia, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Laboratory Director.
Fomin was one of two facility user representatives invited to speak at the ceremony. Her connection to Jefferson Lab is a long and continuing one: it’s where she did her doctoral research while completing a PhD at the University of Virginia. She is now the spokesperson on two experiments at Jefferson Lab, where she works on short-range correlation experiments as well as the EMC effect. She also has two UT students of her own doing PhD research there. One is Jason Bane, who won a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program award in 2015 to complete his work on The EMC Effect in Three-body Systems.
Fomin was asked to remark on what the Jefferson Lab upgrade meant to the scientific user community and how excited they were about it. Her remarks were quoted in The Daily Press (headquartered in Newport News):
"To maintain support, she said the scientists had to do their part and show their enthusiasm for what they do and share it with the people they know outside of the lab. She highlighted the outreach the lab does with students, some of whom may be inspired to pursue science or become engineers or even just ‘go home and tell their parents about the cool things that they saw at their neighborhood, world-class accelerator facility.’"
Other media outlets also covered the event:
Jefferson Lab explains on their website that it is the world’s most advanced particle accelerator for investigating the quart structure of the atom’s nucleus. Learn more about their work at the site: https://www.jlab.org.