Word: cyclotron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 56, University of California's Radiation Laboratory director, invented the atom-smashing cyclotron-which has been called "as useful in research as the microscope." Born in Canton, S.D., where his father was a superintendent of schools, Lawrence worked his way through local Midwestern colleges selling aluminum ware from door to door, and successfully so, despite the fact that the cakes he baked, as part of his presentation, usually caved flat as a platter. A Ph.D. (Yale, 1925), he spent his early career studying the phenomenon of ionization, began working on the cyclotron as early...
Other work has been going on for some time at the site which is just off Oxford St., north of the University Museums and next to the Harvard Cyclotron. The skeletal structure of one of the major adjacent buildings is nearing completion...
Overstuffed Atom. Fields and his colleague Arnold Friedman decided that the best bet would be to bombard curium with carbon ions in a cyclotron. This would be quite a trick; curium, element No. 96, is itself synthetic and intensely radioactive. If any of it were fattened into element 102, the fragile, overstuffed atoms would predictably disintegrate in a few minutes...
Fields and Friedman interested British Chemist John Milsted, who wangled some time on the Stockholm cyclotron, the only one in operation capable of projecting a sufficiently intense beam of carbon ions. Milsted also undertook the tricky job of making curium into a thin film, and sandwiching it between aluminum foil to form a suitable target. The apparatus was arranged so that any atoms of element 102 formed would be knocked out of the target and would stick to a "catcher foil," a bit of plastic film...
...disintegrated so fast that a major problem was to prove that it had been created at all. The scientists developed a technique that would have done credit to a team of Japanese jugglers. After the curium had been bombarded for about 20 minutes, the Swedes shut down the cyclotron. As the concrete shield opened, a group of scientists, wearing gloves and dust masks against radioactivity, dashed into the cyclotron chamber. One snatched the target from the machine, another took it apart and passed it to a third, who extracted the catcher foil. The fastest runner, generally Swedish Chemist Lennart Holm...