French heavy‐ion cyclotron facility starting up
At Caen, near the Normandy coast, construction of the French national heavy‐ion accelerator facility, GANIL (Grand Accelerateur National d'Ions Lourds), has now been completed. GANIL is a tandem system of two large conventional (not superconducting) cyclotrons, designed to accelerate all ionic species from carbon to uranium. The maximum energy will be about 100 MeV per nucleon for the lighter ions, falling gradually to 10 MeV per nucleon at the heavy end of the periodic table. Thus GANIL will be, for the next few years, the most powerful heavy‐ion cyclotron facility in the world.