Abstract
THE Council of the Physical Society has awarded the seventeenth Duddell Medal to Prof. E. O. Lawrence, of the University of California, Berkeley, for his invention and subsequent development of the cyclotron. Prof. Lawrence, who was born in 1901, went to Berkeley in 1928 and was appointed professor of physics there in 1930. In that year, with M.S. Livingston, he constructed the first cyclotron, which had a comparatively small electromagnet and a pole-gap chamber only six inches in diameter. An 85-ton electromagnet was incorporated in the next cyclotron, designed in collaboration with D. Cooksey; it has an 8-inch pole-gap and a cylindrical chamber 37 inches in diameter. Lawrence was fortunate in obtaining supplies of deuterium oxide from Prof. G. N. Lewis, of the Chemical Department of the University, who had prepared it in quantity. By the summer of 1935, the 37-inch cyclotron had been used to accelerate deuterons to energies equivalent to about 5 million electron-volts, and 41 Mev. deuterons had been employed as projectiles for nuclear transformations. Later, 8-Mev. deuterons and 16-Mev. a-particles were produced and used as projectiles to obtain large yields of neutrons from beryllium and also to obtain artificial radioactive elements, for example, 100 milli-curies of radio-sodium.
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Duddell Medallist of the Physical Society. Nature 145, 852 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145852b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145852b0