What have we learned using the CEBAF microscope to study hadronic matter?
High-energy electrons are a remarkably clean probe of hadronic matter, essentially providing a microscope for examining atomic nuclei and the strong nuclear force. For more than a decade, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab (JLab) has been a leading facility for such investigations, resulting in a number of surprising discoveries and a substantive refinement of our understanding of the nucleon, its underlying quark structure, and the dynamics of the strong interaction. The insights gained from research at JLab cover a broad range of length scales, monitored by the 4-momentum transfer Q$^{2}$, in elastic, inelastic, and deeply inelastic scattering regimes. One notable discovery has been the unexpected Q$^{2}$ variation of the ratio of the proton elastic form-factors G$^{p}_{E}$ / G$^{p}_{M}$, which suggests an important contribution from quark orbital angular momentum to the spin of the nucleon. This finding is further supported by spin-dependent d
High-energy electrons are a remarkably clean probe of hadronic matter, essentially providing a microscope for examining atomic nuclei and the strong nuclear force. For more than a decade, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab (JLab) has been a leading facility for such investigations, resulting in a number of surprising discoveries and a substantive refinement of our understanding of the nucleon, its underlying quark structure, and the dynamics of the strong interaction. The insights gained from research at JLab cover a broad range of length scales, monitored by the 4-momentum transfer Q^2, in elastic, inelastic, and deeply inelastic scattering regimes. One notable discovery has been the unexpected Q^2 variation of the ratio of the proton elastic form-factors G^pE / G^pM, which suggests an important contribution from quark orbital angular momentum to the spin of the nucleon. This finding is further supported by spin-dependent deep-inelastic measurem
High-energy electrons are a remarkably clean probe of hadronic matter, essentially providing a microscope for examining atomic nuclei and the strong nuclear force. For more than a decade, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab (JLab) has been a leading facility for such investigations, resulting in a number of surprising discoveries and a substantive refinement of our understanding of the nucleon, its underlying quark structure, and the dynamics of the strong interaction. The insights gained from research at JLab cover a broad range of length scales, monitored by the 4-momentum transfer Q$^{2}$, in elastic, inelastic, and deeply inelastic scattering regimes. One notable discovery has been the unexpected Q$^{2}$ variation of the ratio of the proton elastic form-factors G$^{p}_{E}$ / G$^{p}_{M}$, which suggests an important contribution from quark orbital angular momentum to the spin of the nucleon. This finding is further supported by spin-dependent d
