Jefferson Lab scientist takes antimatter beam research to Capitol Hill

Three minutes, one slide and a Capitol Hill audience of lawmakers, staffers and lab representatives forced Tyler Hague to do what scientists rarely get enough room to do: strip antimatter research down to the part that matters most. At the 2026 National Lab Research SLAM on April 15, Hague represented Jefferson Lab in a field of 17 early-career scientists, each trying to make a dense research program legible in a public pitch. The challenge was not just to describe a beam, but to explain why antimatter belongs in the national conversation at all.

That matters because antimatter is not a novelty act. In the physics that still governs the field, the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts, yet the visible universe is overwhelmingly made of matter. Precision studies of antimatter, along with the search for tiny violations of fundamental symmetries such as CP violation, sit inside one of the biggest unresolved problems in physics: why the universe looks the way it does. Hague’s work at Jefferson Lab fits that frontier, where accelerator-based nuclear physics is used to probe subatomic structure, fundamental symmetries and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions.

Jefferson Lab built the right setting for that pitch. Its Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, or CEBAF, is a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility and one of the world’s most advanced particle accelerators for nuclear physics. The lab says more than 1,300 visiting scientists and students from the United States and abroad also conduct research there as users, which makes Hague’s project part of a much larger ecosystem than a single beamline or one lab office in Newport News, Virginia. The broader DOE laboratory system brings added weight, too: the department says its 17 national laboratories have driven U.S. scientific innovation for more than 70 years.

Hague’s route into that system started with a high-school field trip to Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and a teacher who kept drawing curious students into physics conversations. He arrived at Jefferson Lab in 2014 as a third-year graduate student at Kent State University, earned his doctorate in 2020, then held postdoctoral posts at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before returning full time. Jefferson Lab’s STEM workforce staff describe him as thoughtful, curious, focused, creative and collaborative, the kind of researcher who fits a lab that runs on both technical skill and institutional memory.

The SLAM made that pipeline visible in public. More than 200 policymakers, congressional staffers and laboratory representatives packed the in-person audience, while more than 2,150 more watched the livestream. For Hague, the point of the day was bigger than antimatter itself: it was showing Capitol Hill that basic nuclear physics, large accelerators and the next generation of scientists all depend on the same thing, a short, clear pitch that makes the case before the slide disappears.