Experimental searches for the onset of color transparency in protons

Searching for the onset of Color Transparency (CT) is a vibrant experimental effort to observe hadrons in a small neutral transverse size configuration in the nucleus. The observation of the onset of CT lies at the intersections between the quark-gluon degrees of freedom and the nucleonic descriptions of nuclei. CT is fundamentally predicted by quantum chromodynamics and is expected to be observable in exclusive scattering as a reduction of final state interactions (FSI) of the point-like hadron with the nuclear medium. Experimentally, this would yield a rise in the measured transparency of the point-like hadron with increasing four-momentum transferred. The most recent experimental effort to observe the onset of CT for protons took place in Jefferson Lab using an electron beam on a carbon target. This experiment ruled out the observation of CT for the proton up to Q²=14 GeV², contradicting theory expectations. Recent analysis has further ruled out this observation in the shell-dependencies in carbon and in the asymmetry of the missing momentum spectra. This talk will present the recent analysis of the proton CT experiment and will describe a new experiment that will explore the onset of CT for the proton with enhanced sensitivity by scattering from deuterium in unconventional (high FSI) kinematics at Jefferson Lab.