Superconducting heavy‐ion linac at Stony Brook

The world's first university‐based superconducting heavy‐ion linac was dedicated in April at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. By adding a ten‐meter‐long superconducting booster to Stony Brook's fifteen‐year‐old tandem Van de Graaff accelerator at a cost of $4.6 million, the Stony Brook group has produced a 20‐megavolt linear accelerator capable of accelerating ions with mass numbers from 16 to about 100. The maximum energy per nucleon, 8.3 MeV, is attained for nickel, in the middle of this mass range. The only other comparable superconducting linac currently in operation is at Argonne National Laboratory.