A decade after achieving first beam, the Department of Energy’s
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility completes data
collection on its 100th experiment 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. A property of QCD, called
confinement, states that no quark can ever be found alone.
Instead, they're always spied in pairs (as mesons) or in
triplets (as baryons). "You never find a quark by itself, in
isolation. That's really a very bizarre thing and a huge
mystery. So what happens when you try to get one quark alone?"
asks Will Brooks, Jefferson Lab Staff Scientist and experiment
spokesperson. Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam
Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), located in Newport News, Va., is
helping physicists answer that question. The electron beam is
one of the few tools on Earth that can separate quarks. "Y