Caltech's Synchrotron

Preliminary operation of the new synchrotron at the California Institute of Technology has been announced by R. F. Bacher, chairman of the Caltech physics division and director of the eight‐man team cooperating on construction of the machine under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. Electrons have already been accelerated to 460 Mev, and when a lead plate was put in the path of the electron beam for test purposes, x‐rays of the same energy were obtained. The previous high in electron energies was between 325 and 340 Mev produced by synchrotrons at the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and by the betatron at the University of Illinois.