This 1952 educational film shows the use of “atom smashers” such as the Cyclotron and Betatron particle accelerators. The film features physical scientist “Professor Porter from the university” commenting about the subject of atomic structure and particle physics.
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1934 in which charged particles accelerate outwards from the centre along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying (radio frequency) electric field. Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel prize in physics for this invention. Cyclotrons were the most powerful particle accelerator technology until the 1950s when they were superseded by the synchrotron, and are still used to produce particle beams in physics and nuclear medicine. The largest single-magnet cyclotron was the 4.67 m (184 in) synchrocyclotron built between 1940 and 1946 by Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley, which could accelerate protons to 730 MeV. The largest cyclotron is the 17.1 m (56 ft) multimagnet TRIUMF accelerator at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia which can produce 500 MeV protons.
There are over 1200 cyclotrons used in nuclear medicine worldwide for the production of radionuclides.
A betatron is a type of cyclic particle accelerator. It is essentially a transformer with a torus-shaped vacuum tube as its secondary coil. An alternating current in the primary coils accelerates electrons in the vacuum around a circular path. The betatron was the first machine capable of producing electron beams at energies higher than could be achieved with a simple electron gun.[citation needed]
The betatron was developed in 1935 by Max Steenbeck in Germany to accelerate electrons, but the concepts ultimately originate from Rolf Widerøe, whose development of an induction accelerator failed due to the lack of transverse focusing. Subsequent development occurred in the United States through Donald Kerst in the 1940s
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