Accelerating atomic particles
OCT 01, 1948
The enormous speeds with which atomic particles smash into target materials are attained as much by ingenuity as by bigness. The author a physicist in the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory, describes how different kinds of atomic accelerators operate.
DOI: 10.1063/1.3066161
In the last fifteen years, in most of the important universities and scientific institutions of the world, there have been built in physics laboratories a great many large and complicated machines which project beams of fast‐moving atomic particles. These machines—the cyclotron, the betatron, the synchrotron, the synchrocyclotron, the linear accelerator, and the Van de Graaff generator—in their seeming superfluity hint that the physicist does not have what he wants, but that he is looking for it very hard.
© 1948. American Institute of Physics
