Question
Question: Who invented the Cyclotron? A. James Chadwick B. James Clerk Maxwell C. Michael Faraday D. E...
Who invented the Cyclotron?
A. James Chadwick
B. James Clerk Maxwell
C. Michael Faraday
D. Ernest Orlando Lawrence
Solution
The first "cyclical" accelerator was the cyclotron. The advantage of the cyclotron design over existing electrostatic accelerators at the time, such as the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and Van de Graaff generator, was that the particles were only accelerated once by the voltage, so the particles' energy was equal to the machine's accelerating voltage, which was limited by air breakdown to a few million volts.
Complete step by step solution:
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented and patented by Ernest O. Lawrence 1929−1930 at the University of California, Berkeley. A cyclotron accelerates charged particles outwards along a spiral path from the center of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber.
A static magnetic field holds the particles in a spiral trajectory and a rapidly varying (radio frequency) electric field accelerates them. Lawrence received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1939 for this invention.
Cyclotrons were the most powerful particle accelerator technology until the 1950s when they were surpassed by the synchrotron, and they are still used to produce particle beams in physics and nuclear medicine.
The largest single-magnet cyclotron was the 4.67m(184in) synchrocyclotron built by Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley between 1940 and1946, which could accelerate protons to 730mega electron volts (MeV). The University of British Columbia's 17.1m(56ft) multi magnet TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver, British Columbia, can produce520.
Thus, Ernest Orlando Lawrence invented the cyclotron.
Note: Cyclotrons were the best source of high-energy beams for nuclear physics experiments for several decades; several cyclotrons are still in use for this type of research. The outcomes allow for the calculation of various properties such as the mean spacing between atoms and the generation of various collision products. Subsequent chemical and particle analysis of the target material may result in nuclear transmutation of the elements used in the target.