Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A circular particle accelerator in which charged subatomic particles generated at a central source are accelerated spirally outward in a plane perpendicular to a fixed magnetic field by an alternating electric field. A cyclotron is capable of generating particle energies between a few million and several tens of millions of electron volts.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun a particle accelerator that imparts energies of several million electron-volts to rapidly moving particles; it is used in investigations in nuclear physics and particle physics.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An early
particle accelerator in whichcharged particles weregenerated at acentral source andaccelerated spirally outward through afixed magnetic andalternating electric fields .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an accelerator that imparts energies of several million electron-volts to rapidly moving particles
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A variant of the cyclotron is the microtron in which electrons are accelerated at one gap at the periphery of the orbits.
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A cyclotron is not useful for acceleration of electrons since their rotation frequency in a magnetic field slows down quite rapidly even for as low energies as a few MeV due to the small rest mass of an electron.
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The sector-focusing cyclotron is sometimes called continuous wave
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Since the maximum energy in a cyclotron is limited by the strength of the magnetic field and its radial extension, superconducting wire coils are used instead of conventional copper coils around the iron poles to provide stronger fields.
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African cyclotron, is to a great extent used for medical applications.
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The cyclotron is thus not a lucky accident, but a piece of apparatus that has, after detailed development, finally proved its superiority to several other methods of attack devised by Dr. Lawrence.
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The last great discovery that has since played an important role in the usefulness of the cyclotron is that of artificially induced radioactivity.
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Furthermore, the cyclotron is by far the most efficient device for generating neutrons in relatively large quantities, and neutrons, in turn, cause many new types of nuclear disintegration.
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Institution of Washington, where a huge 60-inch cyclotron, similar to the large Berkeley cyclotron, is now under construction.
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The cyclotron is by far the best device for producing new radioactive substances.
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