The first million volt cyclotron

29 March 2002

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In a paper published on 1 April 1932*, Ernest Lawrence and Stanley Livingston announced the first ever acceleration of protons to energies greater than 1 MeV, with the 11-inch (27 cm)  cyclotron, shown here (on the right) installed in Room 329 Le Conte Hall at University of California at Berkeley. On January 8, 1932 the device gave its first million-volt reading. "Lawrence literally danced around the room with glee," Livingston later recalled. In 1939 Lawrence received the Nobel prize for his invention of the cyclotron. In his acceptance speech he said that they "had the remarkable good fortune of observing that this apparatus was rather more successful than we had expected ... we were concerned about how many of the protons would succeed in spiralling around a great many times without getting  lost on the way."

(*see The Physical Review 40 19 (1932) )

Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory