A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest 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.
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 centres. 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, Canada. It houses the world's largest normal conducting 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 ISOLDE Radioactive Ion Beam Facility, is an on-line isotope separator facility located at the centre of the CERN accelerator complex on the Franco-Swiss border. Created in 1964, the ISOLDE facility started delivering radioactive ion beams (RIBs) to users in 1967. Originally located at the Synchro-Cyclotron (SC) 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). ISOLDE is currently the longest-running facility in operation at CERN, with continuous developments of the facility and its experiments keeping ISOLDE at the forefront of science with RIBs. 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 sixteen (mostly) European countries. As of 2019, close to 1,000 experimentalists around the world are coming to ISOLDE to perform typically 50 different experiments per year.
The Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) is a U.S. Department of Energy scientific user facility at Argonne National Laboratory. ATLAS is the first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions at energies in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier and is open to scientists from all over the world.
The Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) is a research and development unit of the Department of Atomic Energy. The VECC is located in Kolkata, India and performs research in basic and applied nuclear sciences and development of the latest nuclear particle accelerators. It has a collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The Centre houses a 224 cm cyclotron—the first of its kind in India—which has been operational since 16 June 1977. It provides proton, deuteron, alpha particle and heavy ion beams of various energies to other institutions.
The Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE) is a multi-institutional Physics Frontiers Center funded by the US National Science Foundation since 2014. From 2003 to 2014, JINA was a collaboration between Michigan State University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and directed by Michael Wiescher from the University of Notre Dame. Principal investigators were Hendrik Schatz, Timothy Beers and Jim Truran.
Nigel Stuart Lockyer is a British-American experimental particle physicist. He is the current director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) as of May 1, 2023. He was the Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, the leading particle physics laboratory in the United States, from September 2013 to April 2022.
Witold (Witek) Nazarewicz is a Polish-American nuclear physicist, researcher, and educator. He is a John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor in Physics and Chief Scientist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University, and a Professor at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics.
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.
The Facility for Rare Isotopes Beams (FRIB) is a scientific user facility for nuclear science, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), Michigan State University (MSU), and the State of Michigan. Michigan State University contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. MSU established and operates FRIB as a user facility for the Office of Nuclear Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. At FRIB, scientists research the properties of rare isotopes to advance knowledge in the areas of nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions of nuclei, and real-world applications of rare isotopes. Construction of the FRIB conventional facilities began in spring 2014 and was completed in 2017. Technical construction started in the fall of 2014 and was completed in January 2022. The total project cost was $730M with project completion in June 2022.
Hendrik Schatz is a professor of Nuclear Astrophysics at Michigan State University. He earned his Diploma from the University of Karlsruhe in 1993, and his PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 1997 after completing his thesis work at the University of Notre Dame. He is one of the Principal Investigators for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics and is a leading expert on nuclear astrophysics,. Schatz also serves the science advisory committees for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and GSI. Hendrik's primary field of expertise is Type I X-ray Bursts. His most notable contribution to this field is the discovery of the SnTeSb-cycle. Hendrik was featured in Science magazine November 22, 2002 for his work on experimental nuclear astrophysics. Hendrik has also contributed to Physics Today.
Gary D. Westfall is an American experimental nuclear and high energy physicist and University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. He is also a co-author, with Wolfgang Bauer, of the introductory calculus-based physics textbook University Physics, published by McGraw-Hill in 2010.
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.
Bradley Marc Sherrill is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Michigan State University.
RAON is a South Korean particle physics laboratory within the Rare Isotope Science Project (RISP) that is being constructed in the outskirts of Daejeon neighboring Sejong, South Korea by the Institute for Basic Science (IBS). It was expected to be finished by 2021 before getting pushed back to 2025.
Marielle Chartier is a Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Liverpool in England. Her research investigates the phase diagram of nuclear matter using the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN Her past work includes nuclear structure at the frontiers of the valley of stability.
The Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro is one of the four major research centers of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). The primary focus of research at this laboratory is in the fields of nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics, where five accelerators are currently used. It is one of the most important facilities in Italy for research in these fields. The main future project of the laboratory is the Selective Production of Exotic Species (SPES), in which various radionuclides will be produced for research and medicinal purposes.
Walter Benenson is a university distinguished professor emeritus in the department of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University. He retired in 2008, but continued to teach for another 10 years.
Henry "Hank" Gabriel Blosser was an American nuclear physicist, known as a director for designing and building superconducting cyclotrons.
Alexandra Gade is a nuclear physicist who studies the nuclear structure of heavy elements, exotic nuclei, and rare isotopes, using techniques including nuclear spectroscopy, nucleon knockouts, and Coulomb excitation. Educated in Germany, she works at Michigan State University in the US as a professor of physics in the department of physics and astronomy and as deputy scientific director of the facility for rare isotope beams.
