Bevatron

The Bevatron was a proton synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. It was built in the early 1950s and became one of the leading instruments in high-energy physics, capable of accelerating protons to energies of about 6.2 GeV for fixed-target experiments. The name Bevatron reflects the unit of energy, “BeV” (billion electron volts), used to describe its beam energy.

In operation, the Bevatron relied on a large circular accelerator ring with a circulating beam maintained by a fixed magnetic field and radio-frequency acceleration. Protons were injected from an auxiliary accelerator and then ramped in energy within the ring to reach the target energy for experiments. The machine enabled a wide program of particle physics research, including studies of hadrons and their interactions, and it played a crucial role in advancing experimental techniques of the era.

The Bevatron is best known for the discovery of the antiproton in 1955 by Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. Their observation of antiprotons produced in proton-target collisions provided the first clear evidence for matter-antimatter pairs and earned the pair the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. The Bevatron’s legacy extends into the Bevalac era, during which the facility supported heavy-ion and biomedical research by combining the Bevatron with additional accelerators. The Bevatron was eventually decommissioned in the late 20th century as new facilities and technologies superseded its capabilities.