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Research at MIT
The Bates Linear Accelerator Center is a national user facility for experimental nuclear physicists funded by the Department of Energy and operated by MIT for over three decades. Bates is situated on an 80-acre site among the rolling hills and trees of Middleton, MA, about 20 miles north of Boston and is administered through MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Bates has a user community of over 200 physicists from more than 50 institutions world wide. More than 25 physicists associated with seven members of the MIT Physics Department are active in the research program.
The scientific focus at Bates is to study fundamental properties of the proton and light nuclei, using experiments which detect particles arising from the interaction of beams of electrons from specialized targets. Over the last several years, experiments carried out at Bates have provided important new insight into the structure of the proton:
At present, a major new experimental program is getting underway at Bates. The Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer Toroid (BLAST) is a unique new detector which has been designed and constructed by an international collaboration to carry out a program of measurements of electron scattering from internal gas targets in the Bates South Hall Ring. The BLAST experiments required specialized beam and targets which have the quantum mechanical property of being spin polarized. Bates has achieved record-breaking spin polarized electron beams of intensity greater than 100 mA and polarizations of more than 70%.
BLAST will provide new precision information on the distribution of charge and magnetism in the proton, deuteron and helium-3 nuclei. A particular focus is understanding the distribution of spin in the deuteron and helium-3 nuclei where theoretical calculations are reliable but data are sparse or nonexistent. Profs. Bertozzi, Gao, Matthews, Milner, and Redwine and their colleagues at MIT are playing a leadership role in the BLAST program. It is anticipated that data taking with BLAST will continue for the next several years.
Looking at Bates beyond BLAST, there are a number of exciting, new initiatives under development. First, realization of a highly intense x-ray laser at the Bates site is being seriously considered by a team under the leadership of Professor David Moncton. It is proposed that this would be a national user facility with the potential for 20 or more experimental areas. It is widely recognized that such a light source with a peak brilliance eight orders of magnitude greater than is presently available in the wavelength region from 100 nm to 0.1 nm would have a high impact across many disciplines, including atomic and fundamental physics, condensed matter physics and materials science, femtochemistry, structural biology, and various fields of engineering. A proposal to develop a conceptual facility design and the detailed scientific case has been submitted to the National Science Foundation.
In addition, Bates physicists have played a leadership role in the development of the science case and preliminary design of the next generation accelerator for the study of the fundamental structure of matter. It is proposed to construct an electron beam to interact with the existing spin polarized proton and heavy nuclear beams in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This machine concept is known as eRHIC and would allow hard electron scattering from the fundamental quark and gluon constituents of nuclear matter with unprecedented precision and scope. At present, a conceptual design for eRHIC is under development.
Since the beginning of the Bates experimental program in 1974, education and training of young physicists has been an important priority. Over 110 Ph.D students have been educated and trained in nuclear science at Bates. These students are widely sought in industry and research laboratories for their problem-solving expertise. Over 25 Bates-educated Ph.Ds are in academic positions world wide. At present, eight students are analyzing data taken at Bates as part of their Ph.D research. Fourteen graduate students are hard at work on BLAST and will write Ph.D theses on data taken in the next year.
Further, sizable numbers of undergraduate students can be found at Bates each summer working on research projects.
In conclusion, after more than 30 years Bates remains an active center for research and education at MIT. In the next several years, a new generation of students and data will be produced and the stage set for the next evolution of the Center. If you are interested in our programs, feel free to contact me. We are always happy to welcome visitors to Bates.
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