Particle beams from synchrotron accelerators can be used in medical treatment, in medical and biological research, and in physics.
The name of the synchrotron is derived from the way in which particles are accelerated: a beam of particles is kept in step with an oscillating radio-frequency acceleration voltage as the particles circle the accelerator ring.
In a typical synchrotron, a particle will travel millions of miles in an evacuated pipe only a few inches in diameter.
The phase stability that makes the synchrotron possible was discovered in the 1940s by V.I. Veksler, a Soviet physicist, and E.M. McMillan, an American physicist who proposed the name of the machine.
McMillan designed an electron synchrotron with a beam energy of 300 MeV (million electric volts), built at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California.
It is characterized by being polarized.