noun

• An apparatus in which charged atomic and subatomic particles are accelerated by an alternating electric field while following an outward spiral or circular path in a magnetic field.

  ‘Perhaps the most important improvement has been the replacement of an electrical magnet with a series of permanent magnets to generate the cyclotron's magnetic field.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Lawrence used his cyclotron to accelerate deuterons that were then crashed into sodium, producing a therapeutically useful radioisotope of sodium.’
  • ‘The antiproton was produced when protons from a cyclotron were used to bombard a copper target.’
  • ‘It was only in 1947 that German physicists were allowed to restart their only cyclotron, a small machine built as part of the wartime fission program at the University of Heidelberg.’
  • ‘The first students to work on the cyclotron in the lab setting modified the magnet to better focus the proton beam.’
  • ‘The authors are to be commended for a clear and comprehensive description of how cyclotrons, originally used to study nuclear structure and interactions, were redeployed to treat cancer.’
  • ‘It was Ernest Orlando Lawrence who invented the first cyclotron back in 1930.’
  • ‘Michigan State University is the site of a very powerful atom smasher, called a cyclotron.’
  • ‘The radioactive isotopes must be made in a cyclotron, and because of the short half-lives, the cyclotron must be located at the imaging facility site.’
  • ‘The Berkeley cyclotron created many elements never found in nature - including plutonium, which directly follows neptunium in the periodic table.’