INNOVATION November-December 2014

f ea t ures

View looking northeast of TRIUMF¹s new ARIEL facility. The building was designed to adhere to LEED Gold standards.

Who Says Big Science is Dead? We’ve got it right here in British Columbia, with TRIUMF’s new Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory Robin J. Miller

at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics located on UBC’s south campus. Known for short as “e-linac,” the accelerator places ARIEL—and TRIUMF—firmly in the league of Big Science. “Our e-linac,” says ARIEL Senior Physicist Dr. Shane Koscielniak, “is a new type of accelerator that will be used to create rare isotopes in a new way, splitting atomic nuclei using photo-fission. With it, ARIEL will help TRIUMF transform from competitor to frontrunner in the race to produce rare isotopes for global research in nuclear physics, nuclear medicine and materials science, and it will have an influence on people’s lives

The Apollo space program, the high-energy physics facility CERN in Geneva, the Hubble Space Telescope: these are all examples of what’s known as “Big Science”—large projects funded by govern- ments or international agencies in the decades after World War II. But Big Science projects, at least at the national level, have slowed around the world in recent years, and many scientists have feared that the days of being able to mount large-scale research efforts with worldwide impact was over. Not so. On September 30, 2014, a made-in-BC superconducting elec- tron linear accelerator produced its first particle beam inside the newly-constructed Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL)

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