A massive challenge

Getting the approvals, the funds and the parts to build one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators in the 1940s wasn’t all that difficult for the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Getting those pieces to rural Butler County, where Carnegie Tech established its Nuclear Research Center in 1948, was another matter.

In the years following the conclusion of World War II, there was a hefty appetite for nuclear physics research and the tools that made that research possible. The Pittsburgh area was already home to two such tools: an electrostatic generator owned by Westinghouse in East Pittsburgh and a cyclotron at the University of Pittsburgh, to which Carnegie Tech researchers and students had access.

The Pitt cyclotron operated at 20 million volts and could produce high nuclear particle energies. But Carnegie Tech researchers wanted an instrument powerful enough to be able to study the internal structure of a nucleus by examining the meson particles that hold protons and neutrons together — and they began planning a synchrocyclotron to help reach that goal.

The synchrocyclotron would be massive enough that the original plans to build it on campus were soon scrapped in favor of a 60-acre site near Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. The steel electromagnet that powered the instrument weighed 1,500 tons, and two copper coils that were integral to the operation weighed 96 tons apiece.

The coils presented a different challenge. They were manufactured at a shipyard in Brooklyn, New York, and had to be transported to Butler County. But when permits to use ground transportation to make the 375-mile trip were denied, project officials found a 3,700-mile alternative: The coils traveled by ship from Brooklyn to New Orleans and by river barge up the Mississippi, Ohio and Allegheny rivers. Trucks took them the final few miles to the Butler County site.

The synchrocyclotron was one of the two most powerful particle colliders in the world when it came online in 1950 and remained an important facet of nuclear physics research through the next two decades, when it was supplanted by more advanced technologies like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, the Belle II detector in Japan and the COHERENT experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.