TRIUMF becomes world's third operating meson factory

Abstract

Champagne flowed in Vancouver, British Columbia recently as the TRIUMF cyclotron yielded its first extracted full‐energy beam. With the production of 500‐MeV negative hydrogen ions, the Tri‐University Meson Facility (TRIUMF) thus joined the other two new meson factories—the Clinton P. Anderson Meson Facility (LAMPF) in Los Alamos, New Mexico and the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research (SIN) in Villigen; both of these have already achieved external beam production, have begun their experimental programs and are busy building up beam intensity. The TRIUMF cyclotron, part of a meson factory that has been under construction since 1971, will eventually furnish intense secondary beams of pions, muons and neutrons to experimental areas. The impetus behind the meson factories has been the need for sufficiently intense beams of these particles to act as probes for the otherwise unobtainable details of nuclear structure. Intensities are typically 103–104 times that available at existing machines, and energy resolution is 100 times better. Some particle physics is also possible, as is a program of applied research, notably pion radiation therapy.