The Cyclotron Industry: Manufacturers Past and Present
Well over a thousand cyclotrons are working somewhere in the world right now, and nearly all of them came from a surprisingly short list of companies. This page is a reference to that list: who builds commercial cyclotrons today, who built the machines still running under older nameplates, and what the industry looks like from the inside. It is written for three readers — students weighing the field as a career, institutions decoding a vendor name on a quote or a decommissioning plan, and historians tracing where a machine came from. It is a descriptive reference, not market analysis and not buying advice.
Company websites, product lines, and corporate-status statements on this page were verified August 2026. Install-base figures are self-reported by manufacturers unless otherwise noted, and are quoted with their source and date — treat every count as a claim, not a fact. Corrections are welcome (see the note at the end).
Reading the nameplates
The industry divides into two businesses that share physics but little else. The larger by unit count is radionuclide production: compact 7–30 MeV negative-ion machines (with 70 MeV at the top end) that sit in hospital basements and radiopharmacies making PET and SPECT isotopes — this is where most of the world's cyclotrons live. The smaller by count but larger by price is proton therapy: 230–250 MeV machines, increasingly superconducting, each anchoring a clinical treatment center. A handful of firms also build one-off research machines to order. The sections below follow that split. Corporate genealogy matters here more than in most industries: machines outlive their makers by decades, so the historical section is not trivia — it is how a working 1978 machine gets identified.
Current manufacturers: radionuclide-production machines
Ordered roughly by documented installed base. Energies are proton energies unless noted. The census counts are from this site's own locations census and cover only machines documented there — they are floors, not fleet totals.
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IBA — Ion Beam Applications
The largest dedicated cyclotron company in the world, spun out of the Cyclotron Research Center at UCLouvain in 1986 by Yves Jongen. The current Cyclone line spans the Cyclone KEY (9.2 MeV) through the KIUBE (18 MeV, its volume PET machine), IKON (13–30 MeV), 30XP (15–30 MeV), and Cyclone 70 (30–70 MeV, multi-particle), plus the iKure (28.5–29.5 MeV, launched 2026 for astatine-211 production). The company states it has installed and supports over 400 cyclotrons and 800 radiosynthesis modules worldwide (company website, August 2026). IBA is also one of the two dominant proton-therapy vendors — see the next section. The historic 3 MeV Cyclone 3 has left the catalog; the current floor is the 9.2 MeV KEY.
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GE HealthCare
The cyclotron line inside the imaging giant, and by heritage a Swedish company: GE acquired Scanditronix's medical cyclotron business in 1991, and the machines are still engineered in Uppsala. The PETtrace 800 series (16.5 MeV protons / 8.4 MeV deuterons, variants graded by target current) is among the most common PET cyclotrons ever built — a 2018 company press release marked the 400th cyclotron delivered. The self-shielded MINItrace Qilin (9.6 MeV) serves single-site PET programs, and a new compact MINItrace Magni was announced in 2024 (first installation December 2024; still listed as in development, not CE marked, as of August 2026). GE HealthCare has been independent of General Electric since its January 2023 spin-off.
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Siemens Healthineers
Siemens entered the cyclotron business by acquiring CTI Molecular Imaging of Knoxville, Tennessee in 2005 (announced March 2005 at roughly $1 billion), inheriting the RDS/Eclipse line — an 11 MeV negative-ion, single-particle design descended from CTI's RDS-111 — along with the PETNET radiopharmacy network. As of August 2026 the picture is transitional: Siemens Healthineers' product catalog lists no cyclotrons, and its surviving Eclipse pages are framed as upgrade and life-extension packages for the installed base, while the company's radiopharma business (PETNET Solutions, expanded by the December 2024 acquisition of Advanced Accelerator Applications' molecular-imaging network to a stated 60 facilities) remains one of the world's largest cyclotron operators. No dated discontinuation announcement for Eclipse manufacturing was found; what is verifiable is its absence from the current catalog. The large Siemens/CTI installed base continues under service.
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Sumitomo Heavy Industries
Japan's principal cyclotron builder and the industry's broadest catalog: the CYPRIS medical line (HM-12 at 12 MeV, HM-20 at 20 MeV, MP-30 at 15–30 MeV with deuterons and alphas), a family of made-to-order research AVF cyclotrons from 18 to 90 MeV protons — including the ring cyclotrons delivered to RIKEN and RCNP Osaka — plus cyclotron-based proton-therapy and BNCT systems. Dominant in the Japanese domestic market — the company states a top domestic market share with a delivery record exceeding 100 facilities since 1981 (company website, August 2026) — with a growing international presence. The earlier HM-18 is a legacy model no longer in the lineup.
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ACSI — Advanced Cyclotron Systems Inc.
The commercial descendant of TRIUMF's cyclotron expertise: EBCO Industries helped build the 500 MeV TRIUMF machine from 1979, the technology was commercialized in 1989 with the first TR-30 delivered to Nordion, and ACSI was formed to carry the TR line forward (see EBCO Technologies below; the first TR-30, built for Nordion, achieved first beam in May 1990 per the PAC 1991 record — the company's own history dates its commissioning a year earlier). The current range — TR-19 (12–19 MeV), TR-24 (15–25 MeV), TR-FLEX (12–30 MeV), and TR-30 (15–33 MeV at up to 1.6 mA) — is known for high beam current; TR-30s are workhorses of commercial SPECT-isotope production. The earlier TR-13/14 models are legacy. The company publishes no numeric install-base claim.
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Best Cyclotron Systems (TeamBest)
The cyclotron arm of Krishnan Suthanthiran's TeamBest group (formally Best Theratronics Ltd. operating as Best Cyclotron Systems). The B-series runs from the Best 15p through 25p, 35p, and 70p — the 70 MeV machine competing with IBA's Cyclone 70 for national-lab-scale isotope production. The group also owns the former ABT Molecular Imaging technology: ABT (founded 2006) built the BG-75 "biomarker generator," a 7.5 MeV dose-on-demand PET machine, and after ABT's 2018 bankruptcy Best Medical International purchased the assets — the machine is now sold as the Best B-100, alongside the 9.5 MeV BG-95 (both per the company's sites, August 2026). No numeric install-base claim is published.
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NIIEFA — D.V. Efremov Institute
The historic Soviet and Russian accelerator institute, whose commercial medical line is the CC series: CC-12 (12 MeV), CC-18/9 (18 MeV protons / 9 MeV deuterons) and the variable-energy CC-18/9M, plus the MCC-30/15 (30/15 MeV) — documented in the institute's own conference papers (RuPAC 2016, THCAMH05, verified live August 2026), which record deliveries including Turku, Finland (2005) and several Russian PET centers. NIIEFA also built many of the Soviet-era U- and MGC-series research machines still running from Egypt to Hungary. Its website could not be reached from outside Russia when checked in August 2026, so current product-line status is reported from the technical literature rather than company pages.
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CIAE — China Institute of Atomic Energy
China's national cyclotron design house rather than a conventional vendor: the CYCIAE series runs from compact PET machines through the 100 MeV CYCIAE-100 (operating at CIAE's own laboratory, and documented in this site's census) to the CYCIAE-230, a 230 MeV-class superconducting proton-therapy cyclotron whose commissioning is described in the institute's conference papers (CYCLOTRONS 2022, MOAO02, verified live August 2026). Commercialization is recent: Chinese business press reported the September 2024 establishment of Chengdu Cyclotron Technology Co., a joint venture of CIAE and other CNNC subsidiaries, to industrialize the 230 MeV machine and PET cyclotrons (Sohu business report, October 2025). How large a commercial installed base emerges is a story still being written.
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Longevous Beamtech (Sichuan Jiuyiyuan)
The most visible of China's emerging medical-cyclotron makers, registered as Sichuan Jiuyiyuan Particle Technology and trading internationally as Longevous Beamtech. The company's site (English-language, verified August 2026) lists a 7–30 MeV line: LB-7SE (7 MeV, self-shielded), LB-11MTS (11 MeV, its volume clinical machine), LB-20 (20 MeV), and LB-30 (30 MeV). Third-party profiles describe the firm as incubated from the China Academy of Engineering Physics' Institute of Fluid Physics; that heritage does not appear on the company's own site and should be treated as secondary. Its machines are appearing across Chinese hospitals — this site's census documents ten, several still under construction — and the company exhibited at SNMMI 2026, its first steps outside the domestic market. No numeric install-base claim is published in English.
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Avelion (formerly PMB-ALCEN)
The French entry, part of the ALCEN industrial group, rebranded from PMB to Avelion (the former pmb-alcen.com now redirects to the Avelion site, which announces "PMB becomes AVELION" — verified August 2026). Its offer is not a bare cyclotron but an integrated in-hospital radiopharmacy: the iMiTRACE compact cyclotron feeding the iMiGiNE automated dose-on-demand production system. The two iMiTRACE installations in this site's census are both in France. The company publishes no install-base figure, and the cyclotron's beam energy is not stated on its current pages.
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Ionetix
A niche American specialist built around one machine: the ION-12SC, a compact superconducting cyclotron (12 MeV per the company's pages; 12.5 MeV in its CYCLOTRONS 2016 paper) designed for in-hospital production of short-lived isotopes — originally nitrogen-13 ammonia for cardiac PET, more recently gallium-68 and alpha-emitter work. Very much alive as of 2026: the company completed a $30 million go-public transaction in April 2026 (company press release). No install-base figure is published.
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Samyoung Unitech (KOTRON-13, Korea)
Korea's domestic PET-cyclotron program: the KIRAMS-13 design (13 MeV, self-shielded), developed at the Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences, was commercialized as the KOTRON-13 by Samyoung Unitech under a technology transfer and deployed through Korea's regional cyclotron installation project (IAEA INIS record, 2005, verified live August 2026). Whether new KOTRON machines are still being manufactured could not be verified — the company's website was unreachable when checked in August 2026 — so this entry records a documented program whose current commercial status is unknown.
Current manufacturers: proton-therapy cyclotrons
Proton-therapy centers are the industry's high end — machine energies near 230–250 MeV and center costs in the tens of millions. IBA (Proteus line, above) and Sumitomo also compete here; the two firms below build proton-therapy cyclotrons exclusively. Not every proton-therapy vendor uses a cyclotron — synchrotron-based systems (Hitachi, ProTom, and others) are out of scope for this page.
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Varian (a Siemens Healthineers company)
Varian's ProBeam proton-therapy system is built around a 250 MeV superconducting isochronous cyclotron whose design came from ACCEL Instruments of Germany (acquired by Varian in 2007; the machine's physics is documented in Baumgarten et al., Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 570, 2007 — the same design as PSI's COMET). Siemens Healthineers completed its $16.4 billion acquisition of Varian in April 2021, and as of August 2026 varian.com redirects to the Siemens Healthineers cancer-care site, where ProBeam remains a current product — meaning Siemens, which no longer sells isotope cyclotrons under its own name, sells the industry's highest-energy commercial cyclotron under Varian's. No current ProBeam site count was found on the migrated pages.
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Mevion Medical Systems
Mevion built the industry's most radical compact machine: the MEVION S250 family mounts a ~250 MeV superconducting synchrocyclotron directly on the treatment gantry, rotating the entire accelerator around the patient to make single-room proton therapy possible. The first patient was treated in 2013; current models are the S250i and S250-FIT (the company describes the "world's only gantry-mounted proton accelerator" — company website, August 2026). Mevion states it has "more systems installed and treating patients than any other compact proton therapy manufacturer," without publishing a number. Ownership reflects large Chinese-led investment rounds (HOPU Investments and YuanMing Capital, 2015 and 2018, per contemporaneous business press); the company remains US-headquartered with 2026 installations announced in the US, Vietnam, and Italy.
Historical manufacturers
Machines outlive companies. The names below are gone from the market but survive on nameplates, in logbooks, and in this site's census — each entry notes the company's fate, with a source. The timeline below draws the whole genealogy first: every manufacturer on this page, from documented market entry to exit, acquisition, or the present, with the acquisitions that stitched the industry together marked at their cited years.
Timeline data (table)
| Manufacturer | HQ | In the market | Fate | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scanditronix | Sweden | 1961 – 1991 | acquired by GE, 1991 | Founded 1961; MC series. GE acquired the medical-cyclotron business in 1991 — today’s PETtrace/MINItrace line is its direct descendant. |
| Thomson-CSF / CGR-MeV | France | 1960s – 1988 | CGR folded into GE, 1988 | CYCLONE 110 inaugurated 1972; earliest machine in this site’s census 1967. CGR went to GE in the 1988 GE–Thomson asset swap; the cyclotron line was not continued. |
| GE HealthCare | US | 1991 – present | active | Entered cyclotrons by acquiring Scanditronix’s medical-cyclotron business in 1991; machines still engineered in Uppsala. Independent of General Electric since January 2023. |
| Philips | Netherlands | early 1960s – mid-1970s | exited by the 1980s; no dated source | AVF design papers 1963; VU Amsterdam machine operational 1964. Major deliveries end in the mid-1970s; absent from vendor lists by the 1980s. |
| AEG | Germany | late 1960s – 1970s | exited; no dated source | Compact cyclotrons including the K=22 machine running at DKFZ Heidelberg from 1971; earliest census machine 1968. The exit left no citable date. |
| The Cyclotron Corporation | US | ~1971 – early 1980s | ceased operations, early 1980s | CS/CV/CP compact machines worldwide; publication trail 1971–1981, last CP-42 deliveries around 1982. A precise bankruptcy date proved elusive. |
| Sumitomo Heavy Industries | Japan | 1981 – present | active | Company founded 1888; cyclotron delivery record exceeding 100 facilities since 1981. CYPRIS medical line plus made-to-order research and proton-therapy machines. |
| Japan Steel Works | Japan | 1980s | no longer selling cyclotrons (Schmor, 2010) | BC “Baby Cyclotron” series (IEEE paper, 1983). Listed by Schmor (2010) among makers no longer offering cyclotrons; the exit itself is undated. |
| Oxford Instruments (OSCAR) | UK | late 1980s – 1990s | exited (undated); design passed to EuroMeV | Yokeless superconducting H⁻ compact (CYCLOTRONS 1986). Exit year not reliably documented; Schmor (2010) records EuroMeV’s ISOTRACE as based on the OSCAR-12. |
| IBA | Belgium | 1986 – present | active | Spun out of UCLouvain’s Cyclotron Research Center in 1986. Cyclone isotope line and Proteus proton therapy; the company states 400+ cyclotrons installed. |
| EBCO Technologies | Canada | 1979 – c. 1990 | continued as ACSI (rename; year not dated here) | TRIUMF construction from 1979; built the first TR-30 (first beam May 1990). The cyclotron business continued as Advanced Cyclotron Systems Inc. |
| ACSI | Canada | 1989 – present | active | TR line commercialized 1989 (first TR-30 built for Nordion); ACSI’s own formation year is not dated on this page. TR-19/24/FLEX/30 today. |
| CTI Molecular Imaging | US | – 2005 | acquired by Siemens, 2005 | The RDS 11 MeV line put cyclotrons in hospital basements at scale. Founding not dated on this page; earliest census machine 1990. Acquired by Siemens in 2005. |
| Siemens Healthineers | Germany | 2005 – present | active (isotope line absent from catalog, 2026) | Entered via the 2005 CTI acquisition (Eclipse line). As of August 2026 its catalog lists no isotope cyclotrons, but ProBeam continues under the Varian name. |
| ACCEL Instruments | Germany | – 2007 | acquired by Varian, January 2007 | Built PSI’s 250 MeV superconducting proton-therapy cyclotron (papers 2001–2005); founding not dated on this page. Its design became the ProBeam. |
| Varian | US | 2007 – 2021 (cyclotrons) | acquired by Siemens Healthineers, April 2021 | Company founded 1948; entered cyclotrons via the 2007 ACCEL acquisition. The bar spans its time as a cyclotron vendor, not the company’s life. |
| NIIEFA (Efremov) | Russia | Soviet era – present | active | Soviet/Russian accelerator institute; earliest machine in this site’s census 1958. CC medical series documented in conference papers, deliveries including Turku 2005. |
| Samyoung Unitech | South Korea | mid-2000s – ? | current status unverifiable, August 2026 | KOTRON-13 (KIRAMS-13 technology transfer), deployed through Korea’s regional cyclotron project (IAEA record, 2005). Whether machines are still made could not be verified. |
| Mevion | US | 2004 – present | active | Founded 2004 as Still River Systems. Gantry-mounted ~250 MeV superconducting synchrocyclotron; first patient treated 2013; S250i and S250-FIT current. |
| ABT Molecular Imaging | US | 2006 – 2018 | bankrupt 2018; assets to Best | BG-75 7.5 MeV dose-on-demand “biomarker generator”. After the 2018 bankruptcy, Best Medical International purchased the assets — sold today as the Best B-100. |
| Best Cyclotron Systems | Canada / US | – present | active | TeamBest’s cyclotron arm (B-series 15p–70p). Parent Best Medical International founded 1977; the cyclotron line’s own start is not dated on this page. ABT assets acquired 2018. |
| Avelion (formerly PMB) | France | – present | active (renamed from PMB; confirmed August 2026) | ALCEN group; iMiTRACE cyclotron inside the iMiGiNE radiopharmacy (earliest census machine 2020). The PMB-to-Avelion rebrand is a rename, not an acquisition. |
| Longevous Beamtech | China | 2017 – present | active | Sichuan Jiuyiyuan Particle Technology, established 2017. LB series, 7–30 MeV; ten machines in this site’s census, several under construction. |
| Ionetix | US | – present | active | ION-12SC compact superconducting machine (CYCLOTRONS 2016 paper; founding not dated on this page). Completed a go-public transaction in April 2026. |
| CIAE / Chengdu Cyclotron | China | 2024 – present (commercial) | active | CIAE’s CYCIAE machines predate this at the institute (CYCIAE-230 commissioning reported 2022); the commercial joint venture was established September 2024. |
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Philips (Netherlands)
Philips Research developed AVF cyclotrons in the early 1960s (the design papers are in the 1963 Sector-Focused Cyclotrons proceedings) and delivered research machines including the VU Amsterdam 28 MeV cyclotron (operational 1964, per the BV Cyclotron VU history), the KVI Groningen machine (1974–1993), and the 72 MeV Injector 1 at SIN/PSI (1974). Major deliveries end in the mid-1970s and the name is absent from vendor lists by the 1980s; no citable statement of when or why Philips exited was found — a gap corrections are welcome on.
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Scanditronix (Sweden) → GE, 1991
Founded in 1961 to commercialize cyclotrons for medicine (Schmor, CYCLOTRONS 2010), Scanditronix built the MC series — its MC32NI at DKFZ Heidelberg (installed 1991, 16–32 MeV protons) was the first negative-ion machine to accelerate both H− and D− (DKFZ status report, Cyclotrons '98). GE acquired the medical-cyclotron business in 1991, and today's GE PETtrace/MINItrace line is its direct descendant, still engineered in Uppsala. A remnant lives on: Scanditronix Magnet AB (verified live August 2026) builds accelerator magnets — including for IBA proton-therapy systems — but no cyclotrons.
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CTI Molecular Imaging (US) → Siemens, 2005
The company that put cyclotrons in hospital basements at scale: the RDS ("Radioisotope Delivery System") line of 11 MeV negative-ion machines, sold alongside PET scanners and the PETNET radiopharmacy network. Siemens acquired CTI in 2005 for roughly $1 billion (Jones & Townsend, J. Med. Imaging 2017; New York Times, March 2005), rebranding the RDS-111 as the Eclipse. The 78 Siemens/CTI machines in this site's census are mostly this one Knoxville design under two nameplates.
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EBCO Technologies (Canada) → ACSI
The manufacturing origin of the TR line: EBCO built the first TR-30 for Nordion at the TRIUMF site — first beam May 9, 1990, at 30 MeV and an unprecedented 500 µA (Milton et al., PAC 1991). The cyclotron business continued as Advanced Cyclotron Systems Inc. (above), still affiliated with EBCO Industries — less a defunct maker than a renamed one, listed here so TR machines with EBCO nameplates can be decoded.
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The Cyclotron Corporation (US)
The pioneer of the compact commercial cyclotron: the CS series (CS-15, CS-30), the CV-28, and the 42 MeV CP-42 went to hospitals and labs worldwide — Washington University, Duke, NIH, M.D. Anderson, TRIUMF, Amersham, and machines still traceable today in Brazil and China (this site's census). Its publication trail runs from 1971 to the 9th Cyclotron Conference in 1981, with the last CP-42 deliveries around 1982; the company then ceased operations, listed by Schmor (CYCLOTRONS 2010) among makers that "no longer offer cyclotrons for sale." Its collapse left a generation of orphaned machines whose operators became involuntary experts in unsupported hardware — a cautionary chapter the industry still cites. A precise, citable bankruptcy date proved elusive; corrections welcome.
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Thomson-CSF and CGR-MeV (France)
Thomson-CSF, with Belgium's ACEC, built the CYCLONE 110 inaugurated at Louvain-la-Neuve in 1972 (Louvain-la-Neuve Cyclotron history) — the machine around which the university built the cyclotron center that later spawned IBA. Sister company CGR-MeV supplied the CNRS Orléans AVF cyclotron among others. CGR was folded into General Electric's medical business in the 1988 GE–Thomson asset swap; the accelerator activity did not survive as a cyclotron vendor. French machines of this lineage still appear under CSF, Thomson-CSF, and CGR nameplates.
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Oxford Instruments (UK) — OSCAR
A bold design decades ahead of the compact-superconducting trend: OSCAR was a yokeless superconducting H− machine of roughly two tonnes for in-hospital PET isotope production, developed with Amersham International (Finlan, Kruip & Wilson, CYCLOTRONS 1986). Oxford Instruments left the business — the exit year is not reliably documented — and the design lived on: Schmor (CYCLOTRONS 2010) records EuroMeV's ISOTRACE as "based on the OSCAR-12 initially developed by Oxford Instruments." Today's superconducting compacts (Ionetix, above) are OSCAR's conceptual heirs.
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AEG (Germany)
AEG built compact cyclotrons in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Germany's first compact medical-research machine: the K=22 AEG cyclotron that ran at DKFZ Heidelberg from 1971 until its 1991 replacement by a Scanditronix MC32NI (DKFZ status report, Cyclotrons '98). The company's exit from the field, like much of AEG's later corporate history, left no clean citable date.
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Japan Steel Works (Japan)
JSW's "Baby Cyclotron" BC series (IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 30, 1983) — the BC1710 delivered 17 MeV protons and 10 MeV deuterons — was an early compact hospital machine for PET isotopes, with installations reaching the United States. Schmor's 2010 review lists JSW among makers no longer offering cyclotrons; the parent company continues in steel and machinery.
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ACCEL Instruments (Germany) → Varian, 2007
ACCEL built the machine that defined modern cyclotron proton therapy: the 250 MeV compact superconducting cyclotron for PSI's PROSCAN project (Schillo, AIP Conf. Proc. 600, 2001; Klein et al., Nucl. Instrum. Methods B 241, 2005). Varian announced its acquisition of ACCEL in January 2007, and the design became the heart of the ProBeam line (above) — a nameplate gone, a machine everywhere in proton-therapy centers.
How many cyclotrons are out there?
Honestly: nobody knows exactly, and every number deserves its source attached. The IAEA's 2008 reference book counted almost 700 cyclotrons installed worldwide; an industry census by Goethals and Zimmermann counted 1,218 by 2015, roughly 1,000 of them small medical machines — both figures as summarized in Synowiecki et al., EJNMMI Radiopharmacy and Chemistry (2018) — and the fleet has kept growing since, with figures around 1,500 commonly quoted in the field. The IAEA maintains the closest thing to an official registry, its Database of Cyclotrons for Radionuclide Production (successor to printed directories of 1983, 1998, and 2006; database verified live August 2026, though it publishes no running total on its pages). Manufacturer claims stack up consistently with those figures: IBA's stated 400+, GE's 400th delivery in 2018, Sumitomo's 100+ in Japan, plus the Siemens/CTI fleet.
This site's own census is deliberately narrower: 661 individually documented machines, 433 of them with a manufacturer attribution — every entry with coordinates, status, and sources. It is a floor, not a fleet estimate, but each machine in it is verifiable. The locations map can be filtered by manufacturer, which makes it the practical companion to this page: pick a maker above and see where its documented machines actually sit — or start from the chart below, where every bar opens the map already filtered to that maker.
Working in the field
An honest framing first: this is a small, specialized, global industry. The companies above employ perhaps a few thousand people in cyclotron-specific roles worldwide, and openings are correspondingly scarce — but the skills are rare too, and people who have them tend to stay employed across an entire career, often moving between vendors, national labs, and hospital physics groups. Expect relocation: the work is where the machines are.
The recurring roles, across every company on this page:
- Accelerator physics — beam dynamics, magnet and central-region design, extraction. The smallest group and the most PhD-heavy; the same physics this site's design guide catalogs.
- RF and power engineering — amplifiers, resonators, power supplies. Classic electrical engineering with high-power RF experience; chronically hard to hire for, industry-wide.
- Beam diagnostics and controls — instrumentation, PLCs, control systems, interlocks. The most transferable skill set in and out of the field.
- Field-service engineering — the largest job category by headcount. Installing, commissioning, and repairing machines at customer sites worldwide; heavy travel, deep practical knowledge, and the most common entry point without a graduate degree.
- Radiochemistry and targetry — targets, chemistry modules, and GMP isotope production; chemistry and radiopharmacy backgrounds rather than physics.
- Regulatory and radiation safety — licensing, shielding review, compliance. Health-physics training; every vendor, radiopharmacy, and hospital program needs it.
Typical entry paths: a physics or electrical-engineering degree, then either a vendor's service organization, a national-lab accelerator group, or a hospital cyclotron facility. Graduate accelerator physics in the US runs through the US Particle Accelerator School (USPAS) and lab-hosted programs; the free USPAS course materials and video lectures are cataloged on this site's external resources page, and national labs (TRIUMF, PSI, Fermilab, Jefferson Lab, and others) run student internships that are the field's standard on-ramp. Accelerator jobs are posted on the boards linked from the News & Jobs page — APS Physics Jobs and INSPIRE-HEP for physics roles, the nuclear-medicine boards for operator and radiopharmacy roles — and the communities listed on the resources page are where the field actually talks.
Corrections
Install counts, product lines, and corporate status all change — companies launch and retire machines, get acquired, and quietly exit. Everything above reflects what could be verified in August 2026, and some of it will be wrong by the time you read it. Corrections and additions with sources are welcome at [email protected]; substantive fixes are noted in the changelog.
Sources
- Manufacturer websites and product pages as linked in each entry — all fetched and verified live August 2026. Product lines, energy ranges, and corporate-status statements reflect what each company published at that date; install-base figures are the companies' own claims, quoted with their source.
- World fleet figures: IAEA, Cyclotron Produced Radionuclides: Principles and Practice (2008) and Goethals & Zimmermann (2015), both as quoted in Synowiecki, Shetty & Perk, "Production of novel diagnostic radionuclides in small medical cyclotrons," EJNMMI Radiopharmacy and Chemistry 3:3 (2018) (open access, verified August 2026). The IAEA's descriptive page for its cyclotron database could not be fetched for a current total this session; the database itself was verified live.
- Technical literature standing in for unreachable company pages: NIIEFA CC-series — RuPAC 2016 THCAMH05; CIAE CYCIAE-230 — CYCLOTRONS 2022 MOAO02; Ionetix ION-12SC — CYCLOTRONS 2016 THB02; Varian/ACCEL 250 MeV cyclotron — C. Baumgarten et al., Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 570 (2007), doi:10.1016/j.nima.2006.09.112.
- Historical vendor status: P. W. Schmor, "Review of Cyclotrons Used in the Production of Radioisotopes for Biomedical Applications," CYCLOTRONS 2010, FRM2CIO01 (verified live August 2026) — the citable record that Scanditronix, The Cyclotron Corporation, Japan Steel Works, and CTI no longer offer cyclotrons for sale, and of the OSCAR-to-ISOTRACE lineage. Individual historical machines: JACoW conference papers, laboratory status reports, and institutional histories as linked in each entry.
- IAEA, Directory of Cyclotrons Used for Radionuclide Production in Member States, 2006 Update, IAEA-DCRP/2006, Vienna (ISBN 978-92-0-111506-5) — the last printed predecessor of the online database; cited by report number because the IAEA publication server could not be reached for link verification this session.
- Census counts ("N machines in this site's census") are from this site's locations dataset: 661 documented machines, of which 433 carry a manufacturer attribution. Counts group heritage names with their successors (e.g., CTI with Siemens, EBCO with ACSI) and are floors, not fleet totals.
- Corporate-history dates: Siemens–CTI merger announcement of March 18, 2005 (CTI SEC Schedule 14D-9; New York Times, March 19, 2005); GE's acquisition of Scanditronix's cyclotron business, 1991 (as recorded in the Svedberg Laboratory history); ABT Molecular Imaging asset purchase, 2018 (Best ABT company history); GE HealthCare spin-off, January 2023 (company filings).