University of Rochester Tandem Upgrading

It has been clear for several years that some reasonably fundamental changes in the design of the High Voltage Engineering Corporation´s MP tandem accelerator are essential if this machine is to operate reliably at terminal potentials that are above 10 MV. Although the original specifications for the accelerator only guaranteed 10MV, the expectation was high that the actual voltage limit would be near 13-15MV. In practice, the voltage levels have only recently been achieved at the HVE test facility and at the AECL laboratories at Chalk River, Canada.