Jefferson Lab was also involved in the construction of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in Oak Ridge and its upgrade, and the Electron Ion Collider at Brookhaven National laboratory.

This leads to a design that appears similar to a racetrack when compared to the classical ring-shaped accelerators found at sites such as CERN or Fermilab.

Effectively, CEBAF is a linear accelerator, similar to SLAC at Stanford, that has been folded up to a tenth of its normal length.

One of the distinguishing features of Jefferson Lab is the continuous nature of the electron beam, with a bunch length of less than 1 picosecond.

Another is Jefferson Lab's use of superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) technology, which uses liquid helium to cool niobium to approximately 4 K (−452.5 °F), removing electrical resistance and allowing the most efficient transfer of energy to an electron.

To achieve this, Jefferson Lab houses the world's largest liquid helium refrigerator, and it was one of the first large-scale implementations of SRF technology.

When a nucleus in the target is hit by an electron from the beam, an "interaction", or "event", occurs, scattering particles into the hall.

Concurrently, an addition to the Test Lab, (where the SRF cavities used in CEBAF and other accelerators used worldwide are manufactured) was constructed.

As of May 2014[update], the upgrade achieved a new record for beam energy, at 10.5 GeV, delivering beam to Hall D.[5] As of December 2016[update], the CEBAF accelerator delivered full-energy electrons as part of commissioning activities for the ongoing 12 GeV Upgrade project.

[7] As of December 2018[update], the CEBAF accelerator delivered electron beams to all four experimental halls simultaneously for physics-quality production running.

In addition, both electron and photon beams can be made highly polarized, allowing exploration of so-called spin degrees of freedom in investigations.

In the era of 12 GeV beams at Jefferson Lab, the Hall B program has been restructured to include a new detector called CLAS12, as well as several other experiments using more specialized hardware.

Multiple spectrometers and specialized equipment has been used to study, for example, parity-violating electron scattering to measure the weak charge of the proton and hypernuclear production with the electromagnetic interaction.

[11] CODA is a set of software tools and recommended hardware that facilitates a data acquisition system for nuclear physics experiments.

This arrangement allows electronics capable of digitizing many hundreds of channels to be compressed into a single chassis.