Celebrating ion beam physics
The Laboratory for Ion Beam Physics has much to celebrate in 2023.
On 29 June 2023, the one-day symposium "Tandem & Tandy Anniversary Day" organised on campus in Hönggerberg looked at the early steps of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and at the developments in related technology and applications that shaped the way the Laboratory for Ion Beam Physics (also known as LIP) operates today.
The event marked the 60th anniversary of operation of the 6 MV Tandem accelerator as well as the 25th anniversary of the commissioning of the 0.5 MV Tandy facility. The Tandem accelerator was installed at ETH Zurich in the early sixties for nuclear physics experiments; from the early eighties onward it evolved into a facility focussed on AMS and materials science measurements. In the late nineties, Tandy was the first accelerator enabling radiocarbon analyses with a compact system operating at ion energies below 1 MeV.
Coincidentally, ETH spin-off Ionplus AG turns ten this year too. The company offers complete laboratory infrastructure solutions for state-of-the-art AMS analysis including Micadas, a 200 kV system for radiocarbon dating developed at LIP.
The symposium offered the opportunity to hear review talks from AMS pioneers and to network with younger researchers who contributed posters. It was also the ideal time for acknowledging change within LIP, as two of its most senior members are retiring, and for celebrating their work and roles within the laboratory. Professor Susan Ivy-Ochs, who was responsible for the cosmogenic radionuclide research program, retired officially at the end of May 2023 but still teaches in the Department of Earth Sciences. Professor Hans-Arno Synal, who headed LIP for 15 years, will retire at the end of July and will be succeeded by Dr Marcus Christl, who has been a senior scientist at LIP for 17 years.