Advantages And Disadvantages Of Cyclotron

What is a cyclotron? A cyclotron is a device which is used to accelerate charged particles. The main advantage of a cyclotron device over linear particle accelerators is that it uses the same acceleration gap many times. This ability makes it able to save a lot of space and therefore the cost. The high energy beams are used for the study of the electromagnetic waves, treatment of cancer, nuclear physics research, uses in cosmology etc.

Along with numerous advantages in nuclear physics, cyclotrons have some disadvantages too. The main disadvantage of a cyclotron device is that it can speed up the particles only up to a few percent of the speed of light. At the time of invention, cyclotrons had many limitations, as they were incapable of accelerating small mass particles like electrons. These limitations of cyclotron are overcome by modulating the conventional cyclotron with modern particle accelerators.

Particle Accelerator

A particle accelerator is an instrument that utilises electromagnetic fields to accelerate charged particles to extremely high speeds and energy while keeping them contained in well-defined beams.

Cyclotron

A cyclotron is a system which enhances the strength of charged particles or ions. E.O Lawrence and M.S Livingston devised it in 1934 to investigate the nuclear structure. The main function of a cyclotron is to propel the charged particles outwards along a spiral path from the centre of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber. A static magnetic field is used in a cyclotron to maintain the motion of the particles on a spiral path. The fluctuating electric field in this device helps to accelerate these charged particles. Due to its space efficiency and low functioning cost, a cyclotron is used in different fields, despite the invention of the high energy synchrotron in modern times.

Advantages of Cyclotron

There are many advantages of a cyclotron device. One of the most important advantages of cyclotron over linear particle accelerators is that it uses the same acceleration gap many times. This ability makes it compact and saves a lot of space. The advantages of cyclotron over linear accelerators are:

• The cyclotron uses the same accelerating gap, which enables it to become compact and therefore saves cost in many ways.
• The accelerating particles can be taken to higher energy states within the small space available.
• Besides the small size of a cyclotron, there are other factors which reduce the cost of this device. For example the cost of the building which contains it, the cost of the foundation and the cost of radiation shielding.
• Another big advantage of a cyclotron is that it has only one electric driver. This makes it cost-efficient because of less cost equipment and less costly power.
• Cyclotrons can produce the particle beam in a continuous form.
• Since cyclotrons produce continuous beams of particles, the average power of the pulsed beam of synchrotron passed into a target is comparatively less than the continuous particle beam from the cyclotron. The synchrotron thus passes more power on average into the target.

Disadvantages of Cyclotron

Classical or conventional cyclotrons with a constant field and frequency acceleration cannot receive additional acceleration as the beams become out of phase. They become out of phase with the oscillating electric field. It is because the constant frequency accelerators only function if the particles follow Newton’s law of motion roughly. This doesn’t happen because, at high speeds(relativistic velocities), the relativistic effects become significant, and therefore the particles aren’t bound to Newton’s laws of motion.

Some other disadvantages of the cyclotron are listed below.

1. The speed of a charged particle is increased by the cyclotron device at a high rate, but much less than that of the light wave.
2. It is very hard to maintain the same magnetic field in a large space area for a cyclotron.
3. The mass of an electron is very small. Because of this reason, the cyclotron device is incapable of accelerating or speeding up the electron.
4. This device is also incapable of accelerating or speeding up the particles which have no charge (neutral particle).

Conclusion

A Cyclotron is a device which propels charged particles on a spiral-like path from the centre of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber. The rapidly fluctuating electric field accelerates the particle while the static magnetic field keeps them on a spiral path.

Due to Cyclotrons using the same accelerating gap, again and again, it is space and cost-efficient. There are some disadvantages of a cyclotron device listed in the article which make it incapable to speed up the particles at a large rate.