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Cyclotron
A
cyclotron
is a type of
particle accelerator
invented by
Ernest O. Lawrence
in 1932 in which
charged particles
accelerate outwards from the centre along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying (
radio frequency
) electric field. Lawrence was awarded the 1939
Nobel prize in physics
for this invention. Cyclotrons were the most powerful particle accelerator technology until the 1950s when they were superseded by the
synchrotron
, and are still used to produce particle beams in physics and
nuclear medicine
. The largest single-magnet cyclotron was the
synchrocyclotron
built between 1940 and 1946 by Lawrence at the
University of California at Berkeley
, which could accelerate protons to 730
MeV
. The largest cyclotron is the multimagnet
TRIUMF
accelerator at the
University of British Columbia
in
Vancouver, British Columbia
which can produce 500 MeV protons.
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