The US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, visited Jefferson Lab. Among those presenting to the Secretary was Adam Freese (pictured), a postdoctoral fellow from the QuantOm collaboration, who spoke on efforts to use AI/ML to extract stress distributions in the proton.
S1 Visit
On August 21, 2025, the United States Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, visited Jefferson Lab. Secretary Wright was given presentations on the cutting-edge science done at Jefferson Lab, including the use of artificial intelligence to improve innovation and scientific operations.
Among those who presented to Secretary Wright was postdoctoral fellow and QuantOm Collaboration member Adam Freese (pictured). Adam spoke about Jefferson Lab’s and QuantOm’s efforts to extract distributions of quarks and gluons using an AI/ML-based event-level inference framework. Adam focused on the distribution of stresses felt by the quarks and gluons, comparing and contrasting the proton to a drop of water. Like a water droplet, the proton has compressive pressure at its core and surface tension in its periphery; but unlike a water droplet, which has only a very thin layer of surface tension, the surface tension in a proton is diffuse—suggesting a fuzzy and extended boundary.
Additionally, Adam explained a finding of recent QuantOm-funded research—which was highlighted on Jefferson Lab’s website—that mapping these stress distributions will allow us to determine the average force felt by quarks in a proton—a key step in empirically determining the QCD equivalent of the Coulomb force law.
Full information about the Secretary of Energy’s visit to Jefferson Lab can be found in this JLab highlight on the visit. Additionally, photographs from the visit can be found in a Flickr album by Jefferson Lab.