Building a Cyclotron on a Shoestring
Starting when he was an undergrad, Tim Koeth built a 12−inch
cyclotron. Now he is in grad school and his creation is used in a
senior−level lab class.
I was immediately obsessed," says Timothy Koeth, who, as a sophomore
in physics in 1995 at Rutgers University, got the bug to build a
cyclotron. "I was sitting in Tom Devlin's modern physics lecture," recalls
Koeth. "He described the principle of the cyclotron. He said it required
a lot of RF power. I was—and am—a ham radio operator, so RF was no
problem. It needed a big magnet; I knew I could find one of those. How
tough could a vacuum system and chamber be?" Some six years later,
Koeth's 12−inch machine became part of an undergraduate lab course.
Building the cyclotron required a combination of hands−on
and theoretical skills, says Mark Croft, Koeth's undergraduate
adviser. "High−voltage engineering, vacuum systems, machining skills,
computer programming—the whole gamut. To have one person who could
do all that, and dedicate so much time, is unheard of." Adds particle
physicist Mohan Kalelkar, head of Rutgers' undergraduate physics program,
"Tim has such creative ideas and puts them into play. Even though I myself
am an experimentalist, I don't know the inner workings of a cyclotron. To
actually construct one—Tim is a very remarkable individual."
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-11/p30.html
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*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
