Jefferson Lab Begins Awarding Contracts For $310 Million Upgrade

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Contact: Dean Golembeski, Jefferson Lab Public Affairs Manager, deang@jlab.org

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – The U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (aka Jefferson Lab or JLab) has awarded three contracts as it begins a $310 million upgrade project that will provide an international community of physicists with a cutting-edge facility for studying the basic building blocks of the visible universe.

The contracts are the first to be awarded since Jefferson Lab received approval in September to start construction of its 12 GeV Upgrade Project. Under the project, the lab will double the energy of its accelerated electron beam from 6 billion electron volts (GeV) to 12 GeV. The lab also will upgrade the equipment in its three existing experimental halls and construct a fourth experimental hall, to be known as Hall D.

Among those awarded a contract was the Ritchie-Curbow Construction Co. The Newport News company will construct a $1.5 million addition to Jefferson Lab’s Central Helium Liquefier building. The expanded building will house much of the equipment necessary to double the refrigeration for the upgraded electron accelerator.

The two remaining contracts were awarded to vendors from Japan and Germany for materials required for the construction of particle detectors and related electronics for Hall D:

• A $3.3 million contract was awarded to Kuraray Co. of Japan for nearly 2,000 miles of plastic scintillation fibers for a barrel calorimeter. The calorimeter will be 13 feet long, 6 feet in outer diameter and weigh more than 30 tons. It will detect and measure the positions and energies of photons produced in experiments.
• A $200,000 contract was awarded to Acam-Messelectronic GmbH of Germany, for 1,440 ultra-precise, integrated time-to-digital converters. The converters will read the signals from particles in the Hall D experiments.

A contract for the construction of Hall D, worth in excess of $10 million, is now under review by DOE and is expected to be awarded in early 2009. The entire project will take more than five years to complete, and the upgraded facility is expected to be commissioned in 2015.

Jefferson Lab is a world-leading nuclear physics research laboratory devoted to the study of the building blocks of matter – quarks and gluons. The 12 GeV upgrade will enable scientists to address one of the great mysteries of modern physics: Why are there no single quarks?

Jefferson Lab is one of 17 Department of Energy national laboratories. It is managed and operated by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC for the DOE Office of Science.

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Important Links:

New release about the contracts awarded: http://www.jlab.org/news/releases/2009/awarding_contracts.html

Description of the 12 GeV Upgrade project and its importance written for the non-scientist: http://www.jlab.org/12GeV/public.html

Description of the research work done at Jefferson Lab written for the non-scientist: http://www.jlab.org/visitors/science/index.html

Jefferson Lab also has a You Tube Channel, where people can view an introductory video and see experiments from Frostbite Theater: http://www.youtube.com/JeffersonLab

Brochures available include: a general brochure, a 12 GeV brochure and a science education brochure. Contact: Dean Golembeski, Jefferson Lab Public Affairs Manager, deang@jlab.org