University of North Texas

Texas

A physics building in Denton holds four particle accelerators in about four thousand square feet of floor space.

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Inside the physics building on the main campus in Denton, four particle accelerators sit in roughly four thousand square feet. There is a three million volt tandem Pelletron, a second three million volt Pelletron, a Van de Graaff machine, and a small Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. Together they make up the Ion Beam Laboratory, run by the physics department at the University of North Texas. Researchers fire beams of ions at materials to find out what those materials are made of and how they behave. The techniques have names like Rutherford backscattering and nuclear reaction analysis. The lab can also implant ions into a surface, or scan a sample with a microscopic beam to see straight through it. Since 1976, in every even-numbered year, the university has hosted a conference devoted to putting accelerators to work in research and industry.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The facility includes four accelerators: a 3 MV tandem Pelletron, a 3 MV single-ended Pelletron, a 2.5 MV Van de Graaff accelerator, and a 200 keV Cockcroft–Walton accelerator.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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