The contribution that Jefferson Lab has made, with its 6 GeV electron beam, and will make, with its 12 GeV upgrade, to our understanding of the way the fundamental interactions work, particularly strong coupling QCD, is outlined. This physics at the GeV scale is essential even in TeV collisions.Keywords QCD, baryons, mesons, spectrum, decays, structure PACS 14.20. Gk, 13.30.Eg, 14.40.Be, 11.80.Et, 13.60.Le
Why CEBAF?At Jefferson Lab, we study all the interactions of the Standard Model and even those Beyond, but at a quite different energy regime than the LHC: GeV rather than TeV. Precision parity violation experiments measure the weak charge of the proton at low momentum scales, and searches go on for heavy photons. Both set limits on what is beyond the Standard Model. However, the focus of this talk is precision study of the strong interaction using electromagnetic probes.At Jefferson Lab [1], where our electron machine (known as CEBAF) is being upgraded to 12 GeV, we study the spectrum and structure of hadrons, and in turn how these hadrons, particularly nucleons, build nuclei and so determine the properties of the matter of which we are made. These properties reflect the nature of the strong interaction, governed by QCD, in the strong coupling regime: a regime that is responsible for colour confinement and chiral symmetry breaking that shape the dynamics of hadrons. The QCD Lagrangian incorporates all the features required for perturbative calculations to the first few orders that can and do describe hard scattering processes, involving interactions over ranges much smaller than the size