Michigan State University is fortunate, indeed, that University Distinguished Professor Emeritus Sam M. Austin has dedicated his time and exceptional narrative skill to provide us with an authoritative and engaging account of the cyclotron era at MSU.

Like many young physicists who earned their doctorates in the two decades following World War II, he was drawn to the emerging field of nuclear physics as representing the frontier of knowledge. At that time, the entire nation was both excited and apprehensive about the potentials of nuclear science.

The power of the atom’s nucleus, uncovered by scientists in the 1930s, had delivered...

On December 11, 2008, Michigan State University’s nuclear science team was chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to design and establish the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), the newest DOE national user facility, or as DOE calls it: a “discovery machine.”

When completed, FRIB will be the world’s most powerful accelerator for the production of rare isotopes. Many of these isotopes have a very fleeting existence, yet they will allow scientists to study the properties of nuclei in exquisite detail and to determine the role they play in the cosmic origin of the elements. Applications of these...

In the early years following its founding in the late 1950s, the MSU Cyclotron Laboratory played an insignificant role in the U.S. nuclear science program. Since then it has grown into a major facility and is home to the highest-ranked university nuclear physics program in the U.S. In 2008, MSU was chosen by the DOE to build FRIB, a forefront international user facility for nuclear science that will investigate the properties of rare and extremely neutron- or proton-rich isotopes and their role in the cosmos.

Two circumstances foreshadowed MSU’s extraordinary trajectory in nuclear science. First, by the end of World...

Physics was barely mentioned in Madison Kuhn’s 1955 history of MSU’s first century, perhaps because research played a minor role in the Physics Department. The first Physics PhD was awarded in 1935, the second in 1945, and only eleven in the next ten years. However, in 1954, the department undertook a long-range planning exercise,²³and the resulting plan set a goal of developing a reputation in research and teaching, with future emphases in solid state and nuclear physics.

The department grew rapidly and by 1959 had a significant physics research effort²⁴in a number of research areas, carried out by...

The delay in funding had both negative and positive aspects. The project itself and the science that would be done with it were delayed, but the additional time was spent in fine-tuning the design. The K50 cyclotron, as now conceived, had an expected performance significantly better than that initially proposed. A proposal for operating and equipment support submitted to NSF in July 1963 enumerated these improvements:

The maximum energy was increased by 20 percent as a result of improved design of the magnet pole tips and revision of the details of the resonant extraction system.

The frequency range of the...

Now there was a cyclotron, but a cyclotron is not the end of the story. It is a tool for performing research in nuclear science, and an expectation and obligation of a research institution is that it provide to society a product that justifies its funding. In the case of the Cyclotron Laboratory, that product is, first and mainly, basic research into the properties of nuclei and the education of young scientists. Second, but importantly, it attempts to foster applications of its research and infrastructure.

If the laboratory is to remain successful, its research must evolve and address the most...

As the magnitude of the remaining tasks set in, it became clear that it would be two years, at least, before the Cyclotron Lab would leave its metaphorical teen years and become a fully mature facility. But, with the optimism of a youthful faculty and the already excellent capability of the cyclotron beams, a concurrent program of nuclear science experiments and facility development began.

A number of experiments were done with the negative ion, Rochester scattering chamber setup, particularly studying so-called “pickup reactions” in which an ingoing proton picks up a neutron from the target nucleus and the outgoing deuteron...

By 1970, reliable operation of the K50 and the Enge spectrograph had become routine, and highresolution studies of many types of reactions were the trademark of the laboratory. Much of this work was enhanced by collaborations between nuclear experimentalists and theorists. B. Hobson Wildenthal, an experimentalist, in collaboration with theorist B. A. (Alex) Brown developed state-of-the-art shell model descriptions of nuclei and made predictions of nuclear properties for comparison with experiments. Theorists Hugh McManus and George Bertsch developed theoretical infrastructure for studying nuclear structure and reactions, and served as gurus, helping experimentalists plan and decipher the results of experiments.

The...

There was, in the early 1970s, an enthusiasm among nuclear physicists for the science that could be learned by studying collisions with heavy-ion beams. One could use these collisions to heat and compress nuclear material and study its properties in detail. There was also federal activity that encouraged such research. Blosser had served on an “Ad Hoc Panel on Heavy Ion Facilities” appointed by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council at the request of the AEC to study the importance of heavy-ion facilities in nuclear science.⁹¹

In their 1974 report, the Panel recommended that a system consisting accelerator injecting...

Whether a large facility would be built at MSU was unclear. The prototype K400 (now K500) superconducting magnet was funded with the explicit understanding that a cyclotron based on that magnet could be moved elsewhere. There was, moreover, a strong candidate for an alternative site at the University of Rochester. It had an existing injector, a large tandem, and MSU had none. With this in mind Blosser was collaborating with Rochester, hoping that they would move their device to MSU. As might be expected, Rochester had the opposite hope.

The possibility that a K500 cyclotron-based facility might be built at...

A bureaucratic development on the federal level a year later turned out to be crucial for the future of the Cyclotron Laboratory. In October 1977, the NSF and ERDA (now DOE) formed the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC, initially known as NUSAC¹¹²), to advise the agencies on priorities in nuclear science. It was chaired by W. A. Fowler of Caltech during 1978 and 1979. Early in 1978, NSAC was charged by the agencies to evaluate nine facility proposals that were under consideration and to present their recommendations by April 15, 1978; approved proposals would be considered for inclusion in the...

Following the award of the Phase II project in 1978, it was clear that the MSU Cyclotron Laboratory faced a daunting set of tasks. The first was to complete the Phase I system: NSF had funded the K500 cyclotron and an array of experimental equipment that would serve until the Phase II system came on line in 1984. The second was to prepare for the arrival of funding for the Phase II facility and the inevitable conflicts with Phase I as Phase II construction began. The laboratory had also to organize itself as a national user facility.

Of course, during...

The first K500 experiment used a¹²C beam with an energy of 35 MeV/nucleon and began shortly after the first beam was extracted in September 1982. It was performed by Gary Westfall and his collaborators,¹³¹which included everyone with an interest in heavy ion-induced reactions. As can be seen from figure 51, this was the beginning of a new sort of science for the laboratory, where one is interested in the properties of nuclear material and not in the positions and properties of individual quantum states. Initially, most of the accelerator time was devoted to developing different beams, and by...

As noted earlier, when funding for completion of the K500 was received in 1977, it was expected that the new K500 cyclotron would be in operation in early 1980. When, shortly therear in 1978, NSAC recommended funding of the MSU Phase II project to begin in Fiscal Year 1980, the MSU Cyclotron Laboratory suddenly faced a complex set of potentially conflicting goals: complete the Phase I (K500) system; prepare for beginning the Phase II facility; and organize the laboratory as a new national user facility.

The 1978 NSAC recommendation for fy-1980 facility construction included the MSU Phase II project at...

In July 1986, during the review of the 1986 operating proposal, Sam Austin, then NSCL co-director, stated that at the completion of the K1200 cyclotron, planning for the long-term future of the NSCL needed to begin. It took longer than was then anticipated to finish the K1200, but even before the K1200 + ECR system was running smoothly, planning for possible new accelerator systems at the NSCL had begun, and by 1992 was in full swing. At first glance, such early planning seems unusual, but it was driven by a combination of opportunity, time scales, and competition.

The priority recommendations...

In the 1990s, nuclear physicists worldwide became convinced that the most promising approach for gaining an understanding of the fundamental nature of the atomic nucleus lay in studies using rare isotopes. This required intensities and a variety of isotopes that were well beyond those produced at the NSCL Coupled Cyclotron Facility and would require construction budgets well beyond its costs. The principal issue was choosing between the two most promising techniques—projectile fragmentation and the Isotope Separation On Line (ISOL) method—for producing these beams.

In the projectile fragmentation (PF) method, a high-energy beam of heavy nuclei bombards a thin...

In April 2002, NSAC formally presented LRP-2002 to DOE, although its recommendation that RIA was NSAC’s highest priority for new construction had been known a year earlier. Intense activity followed:

June 17, 2002, a presentation onRIA at MSUto senior DOE officials.¹⁸⁴

October 14, 2002, the first meeting of the MSU’s RIA Advisory Committee comprised of influential representatives from Michigan business, labor, education, and government, was held at NSCL.

December 17, 2002, submission ofThe Vision for RIA at MSU-Michigan State University’s Institutional Plan for Maximizing the Focus and National Impact of RIA at MSUto DOE-SC Director Ray...

During this account I have tried to delineate the characteristics of the Cyclotron Laboratory that led to its success by following its journey “up from nothing” in 1958 to FRIB. These characteristics, which constitute its culture, together with its research prowess are why it was ultimately entrusted to establish FRIB, the nation’s premier nuclear science facility for the twenty-first century.

When the Cyclotron Laboratory was founded in 1958, it was smaller and less known than most university-based laboratories. Yet, while many established laboratories at well-known institutions declined and even disappeared, MSU’s nuclear science program grew and is now generally regarded...

The research programs just described—and indeed this entire book—for many will seem to be a story of complex research with complex instruments yielding esoteric results of interest mostly to nuclear scientists. But it is a real story, one that will drive the new discoveries and yield the new knowledge that are the promise of FRIB to researchers.

One might compare the search for the nature of matter to the search for an understanding of history, or of the human mind, or of the origin ofHomo sapiens. It is a topic of intrinsic interest to the curious human...

The evolution of the Cyclotron Laboratory is reflected in the evolution of its staff and scientific facilities. This section comprises brief descriptions of their changes as the laboratory grew and its research focus changed.

Talented people are the drivers of all else that happens. This truism drove the laboratory, as it grew, to devote an unusual amount of attention to maintaining an effective mix of the young and the experienced. This required the development of new faculty systems as we describe below.

Most new laboratories are led by a relatively senior individual who then hires a group of researchers to...