The INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud

Abstract

The Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (LNS) was founded at the end of the 1970s, thanks to the joint efforts of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the University of Catania, and the Regional Government of Sicily (Figure 1). Soon after it became one of the three INFN National Laboratories after those of Frascati and Legnaro, as at that time the Gran Sasso Laboratory had not been realized yet. The LNS started to operate as a nuclear physics laboratory at the beginning of the 1980s, when a HVEC MP13 Tandem accelerator was installed. Later on the LNS was also equipped with a K-800 Superconductive Cyclotron (SC) designed and realized by the INFN-LASA laboratory in Milan, able to post-accelerate the ion beams radially injected by the Tandem. After a few years the radial injection was substituted by the axial injection of high charge state ions produced by two ECR sources. Since that time the two accelerators are running independently so that SC and Tandem experiments can be performed at the same time without any interference.