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Columbia Holds Wake For Historic Cyclotron
Pickens writes "They called it leviathan, behemoth, Big Bertha. At 12 feet wide, rising 7 feet above the cement floor and weighing an estimated 65 tons, the Columbia cyclotron, the particle accelerator built in the late 1930s by Columbia physicist John Dunning, played a crucial role in the dawn of the nuclear era. Dunning's experiments verified fission, established many of its properties, and, most significantly, demonstrated that the rare isotope Uranium 235, and not the more common U-238, was the more fissionable form of the element. 'In a week or two, they will dismantle it, and they will sell it for scrap,' says George Hamawy, Columbia University's director of radiation safety. 'This is the last chance to see it,' Hamawy added as students held a wake and contractors arrived to remove the cyclotron. 'We're going to make two-thousand-pound sections,' said one contractor before taking the cyclotron's measurements. 'We'll start slicing on Monday.'"
With a little elbow grease, you can build a cyclotron at home. The concept is pretty simple. Two D-shaped conductors separated by a short gap.
Reviled editor michael reported on it back in 2002.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/20/1626204&tid=134&tid=14
Definitely worth trying out once.
Once.
Some of its parts have been sent to the Smithsonian years ago. All that's left is the magnet.
No and no. This is (was) not an enrichment device. It is a research device. You might be thinking of a calutron, which was a primitive enrichment device.
Unless it's a superconducting electromagnet, it's probably not all that strong, especially in comparison to the NMR equipment that's likely being used elsewhere in the building.
The largest Cyclotron ever built has a main magnet with a field strength of 0.46 T.
The magnets in your speakers have a field strength of about 1T. Your hard drive probably contains a 1.5T magnet as well.
An NMR (MRI) machine will range from anywhere from 1.5T to 7T (although experimental setups can go a good bit higher).
The strongest continuous magnetic field produced in a laboratory is 45T.
The strongest pulsed magnetic field ever created was by the Russians at 2,800T (they cheated and used explosives).
The reason the magnet is so "huge" is that the field needs to cover a large area.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose