ORNL Researcher Advances Particle Detection for the Electron-Ion Collider

Insider Brief

• ORNL physicist John Lajoie develops advanced particle detectors to study fundamental physics and support research at facilities such as the future Electron-Ion Collider. Lajoie’s work includes the ePIC detector, which will use continuous data collection and AI-assisted processing to identify important signals from high-energy particle collisions. Detector technologies developed for fundamental physics have also found applications in areas including radiological monitoring and materials characterization.
• The original story was published by Newswise and written by Emily Tomlin.

Press release – John Lajoie is a builder—not of buildings or everyday machines, but of detectors with a special purpose. A physicist at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lajoie has shaped his career around finding hard-to-solve problems and coming up with new ways to tackle them.

Detectors are how physicists make the invisible visible. They capture signals produced in high-energy collisions, revealing essential features and behaviors that help us study the tiniest of quantum particles. Without detectors, even the most powerful accelerator cannot answer fundamental questions about matter. Detectors are the essential tools that turn collisions into insight and possibility into discovery.