ANU Research School of Physics

The Research School of Physics (RSPhys) was established with the creation of the Australian National University (ANU) in 1947.

Initially part of the Institute of Advanced Studies it was primarily a research school with limited interaction with the ANU's undergraduate students.

Major research facilities at the school include the 14UD NEC Pelletron accelerator and associated modular superconducting linac run by the Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications plus an extensive range of smaller experimental and computational equipment.

[1] The nuclear physics 14UD is one of a handful of large Van de Graaff accelerators in the world.

For much of the early years the focus of a large part of the school was designing, re-designing and building a cyclo-synchrotron that in its final intended form was to produce a beam of 10.6 GeV protons for nuclear physics research.

The small 7.7 MeV cyclotron designed to function as the proton injector was completed in 1955, and the large homopolar generator intended to power the system was first operated in 1962, but by this time work on "The Big Machine" itself had been abandoned.

Even though it was never used for its intended purpose it ended up being used for numerous research projects requiring an extremely high current source until its disassembly in 1986.

During 1960–1980 a HVEC EN tandem accelerator was used by nuclear physics for light ion research.

The damage included the drawing office, many student's and staff's results and files and the control room for the 600 kV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator.