| There exist a great many photographs and drawings that depict our facilities, equipment, and results. This page gives an ever-expanding sampler, starting with the images featured on our pages. Clicking on one of these thumbnail images will display a larger, higher-resolution version or take you to another web page where you can find in-depth information. |
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Heavy-Ion Inertial Fusion Energy
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The most promising form of inertial confinement fusion for energy production uses beams of heavy ions to heat and compress, or “drive,” a deuterium-tritium target. At this point, early on the road to a driver, our theory work concentrates on three areas where cost-effectiveness would be greatly increased by identifying the most appropriate technology or finding a "sweet spot" among the performance parameters. These areas include injection, the dynamic aperture required in the accelerator sections, and final focusing and neutralization just prior to the target chamber. The ever-increasing power and accessibility of high-performance computing at LBNL has been invaluable in these efforts. Clicking on the thumbnail image will take you to the Fusion page of this site, where our work in these areas is discussed. | |
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Coherent Infrared Center (CIRCE)
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The Coherent Infrared Center (CIRCE) ring could be superimposed atop the existing Advanced Light Source Booster shielding. The
ring design allows for numerous coherent synchrotron radiation beamlines (red) located directly next to the shield
walls. The existing ALS injector can be used for full-energy beam
injection into CIRCE during the long periods when the ALS does not need it for initial injection or top-off. The graph at right shows how the anticipated performance of CIRCE would serve a hard-to-study spectral area, where present-day sources either cannot reach or put out much less light. Clicking on the thumbnail image will take you to the ALS page of this site, where the CIRCE proposal is discussed. |
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Superconducting Magnets
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As we strive for ever-higher magnetic fields, we reach the performance limits of traditional materials such as niobium-titanium, which remain ductile even after the heat treatment that makes them superconducting. Thus we turn to materials such as niobium-tin that are embrittled by the heat treatment. This means we must wind the magnet coils before heat treatment—a change that puts a premium on exploring easy-to-make coil geometries. Shown here are "racetrack" coils within the magnet HD1 and an example of our computer optimization of the coil-end geometry for HD2. |
Editor's note: Many of the older images may be found in Heilbron, Seidel, and Wheaton's article in a special issue of LBL Research Review commemorating the cyclotron's 50th anniversary. Heilbron and Seidel followed up with the first volume of a scholarly history: _Lawrence And His Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California, 1990). Volume 1 goes through the end of the war in depth, with some forays into and foreshadowings of what a second volume might someday offer. The Research Review article sketches out much more of the 60s, 70s, and 80s history. |
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Where it all began: the first cyclotron
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Go back in your mind to 1931 and be a witness to history, for here is the first cyclotron that achieved resonance and emitted an accelerated beam. (There exist two similar units; one is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution and the other in the Building 50 main lobby display here at LBNL.) |
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SuperHILAC and Bevalac
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The Heavy-Ion Linear Accelerator (upgraded several times, as commonly happens with accelerators, and eventually dubbed the SuperHILAC), constructed in the late 1950s, was best known as a discovery site of heavy manmade elements. A 1971 idea by a leader in that effort, Al Ghiorso, gave the nearby Bevatron, obsolescent at the energy frontier of particle physics, a new lease on life: building a beam transfer line down the hill to inject the Bevatron with heavy ions. The result was the Bevalac, still behind the times in sheer particle velocity compared to proton and antiproton synchrotrons but unparalleled in energy per unit of mass. This capability gave rise to the "Bevalac era" of nuclear science.
The Bevalac was shut down in 1992 and has since been decommissioned, but the spirit of the endeavor lives on in the form of numerous discoveries and the birth of entire lines of inquiry, one of which led directly to the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and its search for quark-gluon plasma. |
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184-Inch Synchrocyclotron
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The new cyclotron technology grew ever larger and more powerful during the 1930s. On the eve of war, Lawrence and colleagues conceived of a radical step forward, from 60 to 184 inches. Dubbed the "He-Man Cyclotron," the new unit's size ("big science" in a literal as well as an organizational sense) occasioned their move from the Berkeley campus to the undeveloped hillside where LBNL now stands. Before it could be finished, key portions were repurposed as a prototype for a Manhattan Project isotope separation scheme dubbed the calutron. Had it been built as originally designed, it would have run into an effect that limits the energy achievable with a classic cyclotron. After the war, it was redesigned in accordance with a principle called phase stability that was discovered in 1945 by the Lab's Edwin McMillan, and independently about the same time by the Russian scientist Vladimir Veksler.
The result was the 184-Inch Synchrocyclotron, a bridge technology between the cyclotron and the modern synchrotron. It also arguably stood at the vertex of the divergence of particle and nuclear physics as separate fields. An early achievement with the 184, the first artificial production of pions, was in the vanguard of one of the key physics issues of the day: nuclear forces and the role of mesons. The 184 had a long life, and hosted, among other things, a medical treatment program. Its dome, a Berkeley landmark, would eventually become a central architectural feature of the Advanced Light Source (which also makes use of the 6000-ton electromagnet yoke — faced with the he-man task of demolishing it, designers chose instead to use it as the center support for a polar crane, an item that they would have wanted anyway). |
