A new accelerator explores the social life of quarks

This article describes the new Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) in Newport News Virginia and the possibilities for future research. Rather than colliding bursts of high-energy particles, the CEBAF probes nuclei in fixed targets with a steady stream of electrons. At CEBAF, scientists hope to study the paradoxical tendency of the strong force to increase as quarks are separated, and to observe it conjure up new quarks from apparently empty space and find out how it seeps out of individual protons and neutrons to form the glue that holds the nucleus together