The SuperHILAC, the Bevalac, and the Advanced Light Source

Here is the heavy ion linear accelerator of which Ghiorso became in charge. It produced heavy ions of 10 MeV per nucleon and began to operate in late 1956 and early 1957. Here's the building in which it was housed. The building is still there.

SuperHILAC under construction. Aerial view of Building 71.

88-inch cyclotron.
Then there's the 88-inch cyclotron. This went into operation in December of 1961. Bernie Harvey had a lot to do with that and was in charge of it for years. Claude Lyneis is in charge now. It produced 60 MeV deuterons, but in the intervening years has been converted to the production of heavy ions all the way up to uranium ions.


Aerial view of LBL.
Here's a picture showing where everything is. There's the 184-inch cyclotron, here's the building we're in, the chemistry building, and so forth.

Then in 1971 Al Ghiorso had the idea of using the HILAC as an injector for the Bevatron to make into a Bevalac so it could accelerate heavy ions to the multi-BeV energy range. That came into operation a few years later. Here's a picture of the line going down from the HILAC to the Bevatron to produce the Bevalac.
Diagram of High-energy Heavy Ion Facility (Bevalac). Bevalac: Beam transport line construction, Bevatron end.

Then in 1989 the 184-inch cyclotron building was converted to house the Advanced Light Source, which came into operation a few years later and which later speakers I'm sure will say something about.

Construction of Advanced Light Source (ALS) at LBL. Flow chart for radioactive beam acceleration.

Then Mike Nitschke had an idea, and I can only just tell you this, which was to produce radioactive ions by bombarding a heavy target with high energy protons which in turn could be accelerated and would give you a much broader range for transmutations, because you could have nuclei that had more neutrons or less neutrons than the stable isotopes, and so forth. This was Mike Nitschke's idea, but with his death this work is not being carried on here. Unfortunate. Here's a picture of Mike taken about that time. Here is a chart of all of these radioactive isotopes that could be produced and accelerated in such a machine.

J. Michael (Mike) Nitschke with his detection apparatus at the Hilac in the 1980s. Projected Radioactive Beam intensities at the IsoSpin Laboratory (after acceleration to 10 MeV/u) from a Uranium Carbide target, 1 mol/cm² thick.