Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901–1958) was an American physicist who invented the cyclotron and shared the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for its development.

Particle accelerator: A machine that uses electromagnetic fields to accelerate charged particles to high speeds. The cyclotron was Lawrence’s distinctive contribution to this broader class of machines.
Cyclotron: A particle accelerator that uses a magnetic field and alternating electric voltage to drive charged particles along a spiral path. Lawrence invented this accelerator by combining magnetic bending with repeated electric acceleration.
Nobel Prize in Physics 1939: The 1939 physics Nobel awarded to Ernest Lawrence for inventing and developing the cyclotron. The prize recognized the accelerator rather than a single nuclear discovery made with it.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: A United States Department of Energy national laboratory founded in 1931 as the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence founded the laboratory where cyclotron research became an enduring, collaborative enterprise.
First cyclotron: The small 1930 cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence and M. Stanley Livingston at the University of California, Berkeley. This prototype demonstrated that repeated acceleration could produce energetic particles in a compact device.
Magnetic field: A field produced by electric currents or magnetic materials that exerts forces on moving charges and magnets. Lawrence used a magnetic field to bend ions into repeated circular paths.
Dee (cyclotron electrode): A hollow, D-shaped electrode inside a cyclotron, where particles travel between accelerating gaps. Lawrence’s original cyclotron used paired D-shaped electrodes to shield particles while they gained energy.
M. Stanley Livingston: An American physicist who collaborated with Lawrence on the early development of the cyclotron. Livingston helped build and test the first cyclotrons in Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory.
Manhattan Project: The United States-led wartime program that developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II. Lawrence’s Berkeley research and expertise contributed to the project’s uranium-isotope separation efforts.
60-inch cyclotron: A large cyclotron completed at Berkeley in 1939, with pole faces 60 inches in diameter. Its scale enabled more powerful experiments and exemplified Lawrence’s expansion of accelerator facilities.

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