CEBAF Readies Its Electron Beam for Studies of Nucleons and Nuclei

In April 1983 the Southeastern Universities Research Association won an intense competition for construction and operation of a continuouswave electron accelerator in the energy range 0.5–4.0 GeV designed for studies in high‐energy nuclear physics. Four years later Hermann Grunder, director of SURA's proposed Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Newport News, Virginia, initiated a radical change in the design of the accelerator from one that would stretch a pulsed beam to one that used superconducting cavity technology, just then becoming viable for large‐scale applications, to create an intrinsically continuous beam. (See PHYSICS TODAY, July 1983, page 57; February 1986, page 18; and April 1992, page 19.) Construction of CEBAF began in 1987 and is now nearing completion