Cyclotron
/ˈsaɪklətrɒn/noun
A machine that accelerates charged particles in a spiral using a magnetic field and an alternating voltage.
The Greek roots
Literally: “circle instrument”
The story of the word
Ernest Lawrence's design sends particles round between two D-shaped electrodes while the field kicks them faster on every half turn, and the first working model, built at Berkeley in 1931, was about four inches across. The -τρον ending is a genuine Greek instrument suffix, the one in ἄροτρον, a plough, although physicists picked it up second-hand from electron. Laboratory slang named the machine before the papers did, and the ending went on to give klystron, magnetron and synchrotron.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1930s
Same family
In a sentence
The hospital cyclotron makes its own isotopes because they decay too fast to ship.
Lawrence's first cyclotron would fit in a coat pocket.