Inside Yale's Van de Graaff Particle Accelerator

Once the world's most powerful Emperor Tandem Van de Graaff particle accelerator, this MP model is currently being decommissioned at the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory. It did good science from 1985-2011 when it was shut down. As an independent researcher at York University, I was invited by the director, Karsten Heeger, to come down and take photos, gather data, record interviews, and give a seminar to the lab team and to students and faculty from the Yale's Department of Physics. Today I went into the "tank" which is where much of the gear was. Some of it has been removed but much of the "atom-smashing" beam equipment is still there (but not for long). Soon, the tank itself will be gone. I"m glad I got to visit and document it just in time. This view is along the beam line through the device. Upwards of 20,000,000 Volts of beam energy would flow through here. One of the coolest targets it ever struck was a sample of lunar soil brought back from Apollo 11.