Cyclotron Info
The open reference for understanding, designing, and documenting small cyclotrons. Built for cyclotron enthusiasts — students, hobbyists, amateur builders, and anyone curious about the machine that started high-energy physics.
Why this site? Practical knowledge about small cyclotrons is scattered across ninety years of journal papers, out-of-print books, student theses, defunct project pages, institutional reports, and fifty-one bodies of state regulation. This project gathers it into one place — organized, cited, and verified — so the next builder, student, or curious reader starts from the literature instead of from scratch.
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Understand
General readers and students
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Assess a project
Educators and prospective builders
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Design and verify
Active project teams
All sections
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Learn
How cyclotrons work, their history, what they are used for, design tradeoffs, safety fundamentals, and a realistic starter path if you want to build one.
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Design Guide
634 sourced design rules for small cyclotrons — magnet, RF, vacuum, ion source, dees, chamber, extraction, and beam measurement — filterable by subsystem, each with formula and citation.
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Calculators
Interactive calculators for energy, field, and radius; path length and turn count; vacuum requirements; coil geometry; magnet power; lid deflection; RF matching — each with the math explained.
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Legal
Can you legally build and run a cyclotron? Federal rules and a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction survey of all 50 US states, with an interactive map.
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Library
An annotated bibliography of cyclotron and accelerator literature — more than 200 documents rated for relevance to small-machine builders, from 1930s classics to modern references.
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Amateur Builds
The census of amateur cyclotrons: every documented home and school build we know of, successful or stalled, with specs and links.
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Locations
Where the world’s cyclotrons are: research, medical, and university machines — and which ones you can tour.
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News & Jobs
Automatically aggregated cyclotron and accelerator news, plus current job postings in the field.