The Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA) was a collaboration between 15 universities with the goal of designing and building a

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel electric charge, charged particles to very high speeds and energies to contain them in well-defined particle beam, beams. Small accelerators are used for fundamental ...

for the

Midwestern United States The Midwestern United States (also referred to as the Midwest, the Heartland or the American Midwest) is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau. It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It ...

. It existed between 1953–1967, but could not achieve its goal in this time and lost funding. It was thought that President

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the first Roman Catholic and youngest person elected p ...

would have supported the MURA machine, while one of President

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served a ...

's first actions was the shutdown of the MURA machine and laboratory. In its formative years,

Donald Kerst Donald William Kerst (November 1, 1911 – August 19, 1993) was an American physicist who worked on advanced particle accelerator concepts (accelerator physics) and plasma physics. He is most notable for his development of the betatron, a novel ...

was the director of MURA. At this institution, Keith Symon invented the FFAG accelerator, independently to

Tihiro Ohkawa was a Japanese physicist whose field of work was in plasma physics and fusion power. He was a pioneer in developing ways to generate electricity by nuclear fusion when he worked at General Atomics. Ohkawa died September 27, 2014, in La Jolla, Cal ...

, which combines several concepts of

cyclotron A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Januar ...

s and

synchrotron A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The strength of the magnetic field which bends the particle beam i ...

s. FFAG concepts were extensively developed in MURA. The proposed MURA accelerators were scaling FFAG synchrotrons, meaning that orbits of any momentum are photographic enlargements of those of any other momentum. The concept of FFAG acceleration was revived in the early 1980s,Martin, S.; Wüstefeld, G. (ed.) (1983). ''Seminar on Fixed Field Alternating Gradient accelerators (FFAG)'', held at Jülich Research Centre. informal collection of contributed talks. KFA report SNQ 2 MZ / BS 001 and gained interest up to the present day, see e.g. EMMA (accelerator).

References

* F. Cole
''O Camelot''
Supplement t

:this paper was published posthumously. * :A book by MURA veterans that was designed to augment Cole's posthumous manuscript. * Daniel S. Greenberg, Chapters X and XI o
The Politics of Pure Science
Plume Books, 1967, University of Chicago Press, 1999. :deals with politics around MURA, particularly the battle over funding higher energy machines being studied at Berkeley and at Brookhaven (New York) and funding MURA, a machine that would produce the same energy as Argonne's Zero Gradient Synchrotron but at 100 fold the intensity. College and university associations and consortia in the United States Research projects Defunct organizations based in the United States 1953 establishments in the United States 1967 disestablishments in the United States Physics organizations Collaborative projects Accelerator physics {{accelerator-stub

References

Further reading