A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. A cyclotron accelerates charged particles outwards from the center of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying electric field. Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention.
A linear particle accelerator is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear beamline. The principles for such machines were proposed by Gustav Ising in 1924, while the first machine that worked was constructed by Rolf Widerøe in 1928 at the RWTH Aachen University. Linacs have many applications: they generate X-rays and high energy electrons for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy, serve as particle injectors for higher-energy accelerators, and are used directly to achieve the highest kinetic energy for light particles for particle physics.
The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), located on the campus of Michigan State University was a rare isotope research facility in the United States. Established in 1963, the cyclotron laboratory has been succeeded by the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a linear accelerator providing beam to the same detector halls.
ISABELLE was a 200+200 GeV proton–proton colliding beam particle accelerator partially built by the United States government at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, before it was cancelled in July, 1983.
Robert Rathbun Wilson was an American physicist known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, as a sculptor, and as an architect of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where he was the first director from 1967 to 1978.
A synchrocyclotron is a special type of cyclotron, patented by Edwin McMillan in 1952, in which the frequency of the driving RF electric field is varied to compensate for relativistic effects as the particles' velocity begins to approach the speed of light. This is in contrast to the classical cyclotron, where this frequency is constant.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles. The synchrotron is one of the first accelerator concepts to enable the construction of large-scale facilities, since bending, beam focusing and acceleration can be separated into different components. The most powerful modern particle accelerators use versions of the synchrotron design. The largest synchrotron-type accelerator, also the largest particle accelerator in the world, is the 27-kilometre-circumference (17 mi) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, built in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It can accelerate beams of protons to an energy of 6.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
TRIUMF is Canada's national particle accelerator centre. It is considered Canada's premier physics laboratory, and consistently regarded as one of the world's leading subatomic physics research centers. Owned and operated by a consortium of universities, it is on the south campus of one of its founding members, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. It houses the world's largest cyclotron, a source of 520 MeV protons, which was named an IEEE Milestone in 2010. Its accelerator-focused activities involve particle physics, nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, materials science, and detector and accelerator development.
The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is located in the Canton of Aargau in the municipalities Villigen and Würenlingen on either side of the River Aare, and covers an area over 35 hectares in size. Like ETH Zurich and EPFL, PSI belongs to the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain of the Swiss Confederation. The PSI employs around 2,100 people. It conducts basic and applied research in the fields of matter and materials, human health, and energy and the environment. About 37% of PSI’s research activities focus on material sciences, 24% on life sciences, 19% on general energy, 11% on nuclear energy and safety, and 9% on particle physics.
In the field of medical treatment, proton therapy, or proton radiotherapy, is a type of particle therapy that uses a beam of protons to irradiate diseased tissue, most often to treat cancer. The chief advantage of proton therapy over other types of external beam radiotherapy is that the dose of protons is deposited over a narrow range of depth, which results in minimal entry, exit, or scattered radiation dose to healthy nearby tissues.
The ISOLDE Radioactive Ion Beam Facility, is an on-line isotope separator facility located at the heart of the CERN accelerator complex on the Franco-Swiss border. The name of the facility is an acronym for Isotope Separator On Line DEvice. Created in 1964, the ISOLDE facility started delivering radioactive ion beams to users in 1967. Originally located at the SynchroCyclotron accelerator, the facility has been upgraded several times most notably in 1992 when the whole facility was moved to be connected to CERN's ProtonSynchroton Booster (PSB). Entering its 6th decade of existence, ISOLDE is currently the oldest facility still in operation at CERN. From the first pioneering isotope separation on-line (ISOL) beams to the latest technical advances allowing for the production of the most exotic species, ISOLDE benefits a wide range of physics communities with applications covering nuclear, atomic, molecular and solid-state physics, but also biophysics and astrophysics, as well as high-precision experiments looking for physics beyond the Standard Model. The facility is operated by the ISOLDE Collaboration, comprising CERN and fifteen (mostly) European countries. As of 2019, more than 800 experimentalists around the world are coming to ISOLDE to perform typically 45 different experiments per year.
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.
Francis James Macdonald Farley FRS was a British scientist. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on 16 March 1972 earning the designation FRS. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He was educated at Clifton College and at Clare College, Cambridge. Farley obtained his PhD from Cambridge in 1950.
A Fixed-Field alternating gradient Accelerator (FFA) is a circular particle accelerator concept that can be characterized by its time-independent magnetic fields and the use of alternating gradient strong focusing.
The Harwell Synchrocyclotron was a particle accelerator based at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment campus near Harwell, Oxfordshire. Construction of the accelerator began in 1946 and it was completed in 1949. The machine was of the synchrocyclotron design, with a 1.62T magnet of diameter 110" (2.8m) allowing protons to be accelerated to energies of 160-175MeV. Accelerator physicist John Adams, who later went on to lead design of CERN's SPS, was instrumental in the design and construction of this machine. Its main function was basic nuclear and particle physics research, with a focus on proton-proton and proton-neutron scattering.
The Sarayköy Nuclear Research and Training Center, known as SANAEM, is a nuclear research and training center of Turkey. The organization was established on July 1, 2005 as a subunit of Turkish Atomic Energy Administration at Kazan district in northwest of Ankara on an area of 42.3 ha.
The Svedberg Laboratory (TSL) is a university facility, based in Uppsala, Sweden. The activities at TSL are based around the particle accelerator Gustaf Werner cyclotron.
The Synchro-Cyclotron, or Synchrocyclotron (SC), built in 1957, was CERN’s first accelerator. It was 15.7 metres (52 ft) in circumference and provided beams for CERN's first experiments in particle and nuclear physics. It accelerated particles to energies up to 600 MeV. The foundation stone of CERN was laid at the site of the Synchrocyclotron by the first Director-General of CERN, Felix Bloch. After its remarkably long 33 years of service time, the SC was decommissioned in 1990. Nowadays it accepts visitors as an exhibition area in CERN.
iThemba LABS is a scientific research center with plants at Faure near Cape Town and on the Wits Campus in Johannesburg. The organization has in the past been known as the National Accelerator Center, and specializes in the use of particle accelerators. The main research fields involve the production of medical radioisotopes for the treatment of cancer, material sciences, nuclear fission experiments, development of new accelerator technology and the real-time treatment of cancer patients through proton and neutron therapy. The mass spectrometry unit was opened by South Africa's Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor in 2014. In 2018 a conference was held to mark ten years of a collaboration programme with CERN.
Henry "Hank" Gabriel Blosser was an American nuclear physicist, known as a director for designing and building superconducting cyclotrons.
