A history of the synchrotron

Speaking not as a historian but from a personal point of view, I would like to tell the story of the origin of the synchrotron as I saw it. The beginning, for me, was in the spring of 1945, when I was on the staff at Los Alamos, the wartime atomic‐bomb laboratory. The Trinity test was in preparation, and I was already thinking about what to do on my return to Berkeley—from which I was on leave—after the war ended. I had spent a great deal of time and effort before the war on the design and operation of cyclotrons, I had a reasonably good understanding of the limits on the particle energies attainable by cyclotrons, and it seemed like a worthy goal to find ways to exceed these limits. The cyclotron, as you know, is a resonance accelerator; it pushes particles to high energies by the repeated application of a moderate voltage, which must be applied at the proper instant each time the particle comes around in its circular orbit.

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