Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists are getting a more detailed look than ever before at the electrons they use in precision experiments.

Nuclear physicists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have shattered a nearly 30-year-old record for the measurement of parallel spin within an electron beam – or electron beam polarimetry, for short. The achievement sets the stage for high-profile experiments at Jefferson Lab that could open the door to new physics discoveries.

In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Physical Review C (“Ultrahigh-precision Compton polarimetry at 2 GeV”), a collaboration of Jefferson Lab researchers and scientific users reported a measurement more precise than a benchmark achieved during the 1994–95 run of the SLAC Large Detector (SLD) experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.