Electrostatic accelerator in the context of Westinghouse Atom Smasher

⭐ Core Definition: Electrostatic accelerator

An electrostatic particle accelerator is a particle accelerator in which charged particles are accelerated to a high energy by a static high-voltage potential. The reason that only charged particles can be accelerated is that only charged particles are influenced by an electric field, according to the formula F=qE, which causes them to move. This contrasts with the other major category of particle accelerator, oscillating field particle accelerators, in which the particles are accelerated by oscillating electric fields.

Owing to their simpler design, electrostatic types were the first particle accelerators. The two most common types are the Van de Graaff generator invented by Robert Van de Graaff in 1929, and the Cockcroft–Walton accelerator invented by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932. The maximum particle energy produced by electrostatic accelerators is limited by the maximum voltage which can be achieved the machine. This is in turn limited by insulation breakdown to a few megavolts. Oscillating accelerators do not have this limitation, so they can achieve higher particle energies than electrostatic machines.

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Electrostatic accelerator in the context of Cyclotron

A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. A cyclotron accelerates charged particles outwards from the center of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying electric field. Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention.

The cyclotron was the first "cyclical" accelerator. The primary accelerators before the development of the cyclotron were electrostatic accelerators, such as the Cockcroft–Walton generator and the Van de Graaff generator. In these accelerators, particles would cross an accelerating electric field only once. Thus, the energy gained by the particles was limited by the maximum electrical potential that could be achieved across the accelerating region. This potential was in turn limited by electrostatic breakdown to a few million volts. In a cyclotron, by contrast, the particles encounter the accelerating region many times by following a spiral path, so the output energy can be many times the energy gained in a single accelerating step.

View the full Wikipedia page for Cyclotron

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