The aftermath of World War II—the “physicists' war”—was marked by the worldwide growth of physics. The cold war made physics and physicists integral components of national security, particularly in the US and the Soviet Union. University physics departments grew dramatically in size. Nuclear and high-energy physics in particular received lavish government funding,and the way was paved for rapid and remarkable development.
One key discovery toward the end of the war was the principle of phase stability, introduced independently in 1945 by Vladimir Veksler in the Soviet Union and by Edwin McMillan in the US. Prior to that development, to achieve the highest possible energy, protons were accelerated in cyclotrons,whose operation was limited to nonrelativistic energies of less than 20 MeV when the magnetic field was held constant. In Veksler's and McMillan's designs, both the magnetic field strength and the frequency of the accelerating voltage were varied with increasing particle energy...
