Inside Canada’s 33-year-old TRIUMF cyclotron – SuperNova Machine
In this age of bigger, newer, more powerful mega-machines for particle physics, Canada’s 33-year-old TRIUMF cyclotron is literally a blast from the past. Sure, it’s the world’s biggest cyclotron – but to some physicists that might sound a bit like gushing over the world’s most advanced horse and buggy.
In terms of size and sheer power, TRIUMF’s 59-foot-wide magnet is dwarfed by Europe’s 5.3-mile-wide Large Hadron Collider. When it gets up and running this year, that super-duper-collider will pack a punch 28,000 times greater than TRIUMF’s. Nevertheless, there are some things being done at the TRIUMF lab, next to the University of British Columbia’s Pacific coast campus, that the bigger places just won’t do – such as figuring out how one element turns into another inside an exploding star.
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