This site is to promote the science of accelerator physics, both small and large. The RU 12-INCH cyclotron is only capable of achieving approximately 1 MeV protons, hardly cutting edge. However, the principles of operation of todays large accelerators are the same. With this machine, the student can encounter many of the same features, frustrations, and breakthroughs an Accelerator Physicist might at Fermilab or CERN.

This site is just as much for the web wandering curious techie as it is for a physics student. Please browse through and e-mail any questions you may have.

December 2007:First half of ion revolution visually seen !

A very interesting observation was made during the operation of the cyclotron last December. With the presure high enough, recombination allowed us to see the early ion beam path of it's steep downward spiral (and loss). For detailed information, please read the Ion Source Studies - Part II: Simulations and measurements which talks about the latest ion source. The new ion source is also documented on the Ion Source - Part II (AKA Recent Ion Source) web page.

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March 2007: A Betatron Motion Experiment

THESE ARE NOT OSCILLISCOPE IMAGES !

The sinusoidal traces are from the ion beam hitting a viewing screen.

We replaced the typical ion source chimney with a 3-holed chimney, essentially giving us three separate ion sources. The resultant image on the flourescent screen is that of several betatron patterns horizontally stacked. Analysis of the observed betatron motion will yield information about the ions trajectory in the first few revolutions. Stay tuned !

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New Jan 2007: A fun article by Fermilab's Danielle Venton "The Many Live's of Fermi's [Cyclotron] Magnet" in which Tim Koeth appears relaxing between the poles. This dwarfs our little 12-inch magnet.

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April 2006: Betatron Motion observed

THIS IS NOT AN OSCILLISCOPE IMAGE !

THIS IS NOT AN OSCILLISCOPE IMAGE !

The sinusoidal trace is the accelerated ion beam hitting the flourescent screen inside the accelerator. A 15 second photographic exposure was taken while the flourescent screen was slid in and out, the result is the sinusoidal pattern seen. It shows how the beam moves up and down during it's spiralled acceleration path outward.

For detailed information, please read the technical write up about the osbserved betatron motion and analysis.

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Make Magazine featured our Cyclotron in their second issue in the Spring of 2005.

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Check out our Cyclotron's profile in Physics Today (Nov '04)

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The Rutgers Focus wrote a nice article about our Cyclotron in April of 2004.

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We were Slashdotted on October 20, 2002 !

Below is a plot of the load on this server as a result of the Slashdot posting. The blue trace is the incomming request traffic and the green trace is outgoing traffic load from this web site.

Please note that the Slashdot arcticle was posted at 18:35 and the instantaneous response is clearly noted.

In the first 24 hours there were approximately 31,000 unique visitors to this page, and during the same period of time the approximate number of file requests (pics and docs) exceded 800,000 !