Hampton Roads,
Office 2010 Sale, VA - 0317201156°Few CloudsForecasts | Doppler RadarTraffic Cameras & VDOT Alerts By Tom Shean The Virginian-Pilot© March 24, 2009 NEWPORT NEWS
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility will receive $75 million in economic stimulus funds, including $65 million to speed up construction of a more powerful electron beam, the federal laboratory said Monday.
Doubling the beam's energy will enable physicists to advance their knowledge of nuclear and particle physics, the Department of Energy lab in Newport News said. The remaining $10 million will be used to modernize lab facilities.
Physicists have been puzzled by quarks because these fundamental particles are never found alone, Allison Lung, deputy project manager for this endeavor, said. "It has something to do with how a quark interacts with its neighbors," she said.
With a more powerful electron beam and expanded facilities at Jefferson Lab, "we will finally have a scientific tool to try and unravel this mystery," Lung said.
The stimulus money will generate about 150 local jobs at the laboratory,
Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, Sen s. Jim Webb and Mark Warner said in a joint statement. The lab currently employs 650.
The project, Lung said, will create about 50 permanent positions for engineers, designers, technicians and doctorate-level scientists. The remaining jobs will involve temporary work to be done by technicians,
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Work on the lab facilities is scheduled to begin this spring and take 5-12 years. The $310 million project calls for construction of a fourth experimental hall, a 250-foot extension to the lab's underground accelerator tunnel,
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The money came from $1.2 billion of stimulus funds allocated to the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Jefferson Lab, which began conducting research in 1995,
Office 2010 Professional Plus Key, is operated by a partnership between Computer Sciences Corp. and a consortium of 60 universities, including several in Hampton Roads.
Tom Shean, (757) 446-2379, tom.shean@pilotonline.com