The annual in-person meeting of the Jefferson Lab Positron Working Group was held at George Washington University over March 18–20, 2024. Axel served as the local organizer, working with Eric Voutier (IJC Lab, Orsay, France), Douglas Higinbotham (JLab), and Xiaochao Zheng (UVa). The meeting included talks on the engineering challenges with producing and accelerating a positron beam in Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF accelerator, ideas for new experiments that could be conducted with positrons, and updates on theory related to two photon exchange, generalized parton distributions, and other topics that positrons could hopefully address. Since the last meeting, the Jefferson Lab positron program added five conditionally approved experiments in a highly successful showing at the 2023 JLab PAC. This year, our discussions revolved around advancing R&D efforts to make positrons a reality.
In a stroke of good luck, the meeting coincided with the peak of the cherry blossom season in Washington, and we enjoyed an excellent afternoon excursion to the tidal basin where we were able to pay our respects to Stumpy.