An interesting collection of photographs of various accelerators on the Harwell campus and around the world. The intention is to include here only the Harwell-associated machines, omitting a 1 GeV electron synchrotron possibly sited in Rome, Russian accelerators, AWRE Aldermaston machines, and CERN apart from photos issued as part of its inauguration ceremony. It is not always easy to identify which is which however.
Commissioning of the VEC began just before Christmas 1965. Designed, constructed and commissioned by the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory of the Science Research Council on behalf of the AEA this cyclotron was at the time one of the most versatile in the world and used for radiation chemistry, radio chemistry and radiation damage studies.
This generator has been built to accelerate particles to energies up to 12 MeV. The energy is obtained by using two 6 MeV electrostatic generators in tandem; particles are accelerated in the first half of the machine as negative ions which are then "stripped" at the intermediate high voltage terminal to yield 6 MeV positive ions for acceleration up to a total energy of 12 MeV in the second half of the machine. Thus a total particle energy of 12 MeV is obtained without generating a voltage higher that 6 MeV.
On the 5th February 1960, Professor Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winner for physics, officially inaugurated the world's first 25 thousand million electron-volt (25 GeV) Proton Synchrotron (PS) at the CERN site, near Meyrin, Geneva Switzerland. Protons produced from and ion source of hydrogen gas are accelerated via a "Cockcroft-Walton" pre-accelerator and a 50 MeV linear accelerator and then injected into the synchrotron proper. In the synchrotron vacuum chamber 656 feet in diameter the protons are accelerated by electric fields to 99.94 percent the speed of light and are kept in orbit by the increasing magnetic field. CERN -- the European Organisation for Nuclear Research -- of which the United Kingdom is a member country, works exclusively in the field of pure and fundamental research.
