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tandem accelerator
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Labeled diagram of a two-stage tandem particle accelerator showing a cylindrical steel pressure tank with gradient rings, a charging chain, and an accelerating tube. Negative ions enter, pass through a stripping chamber to become positive ions, and are then directed by magnets toward a target. Figure 8: Schematic diagram showing the ion trajectories in an accelerator mass spectrometer with application to 10Be. Negative ions of BeO leave the source and are mass analyzed with 10BeO− directed into the accelerator and 9BeO− into a Faraday cup. The molecular ions are broken up by gas and a thin carbon foil in the high-voltage terminal with much of the 10Be ionized to the 3+ charge state. The emerging ions pass through a velocity selector, are again analyzed for mass, and pass to the detector. Velocity selection is attained by a magnetic field and an electric field that are orthogonal to one another and to the beam direction; they are adjusted so that no deflection takes place for ions of the desired velocity.
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tandem accelerator

physics
Also known as: tandem electrostatic accelerator, tandem generator(Show More)
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Labeled diagram of a two-stage tandem particle accelerator showing a cylindrical steel pressure tank with gradient rings, a charging chain, and an accelerating tube. Negative ions enter, pass through a stripping chamber to become positive ions, and are then directed by magnets toward a target.
Figure 2: Two-stage tandem accelerator (see text).

A tandem accelerator is a type of particle accelerator that uses a Van de Graaff generator to achieve higher particle energies than a single-stage accelerator. It works by accelerating charged particles, typically ions, in two stages. First, negative ions are accelerated towards a high-voltage terminal. Inside this terminal, the ions pass through a thin foil or gas, which strips off electrons, converting them into positive ions. These positive ions are then repelled by the terminal and accelerated away through a second stage. This process effectively doubles the energy a particle can achieve with a single high-voltage supply. Tandem accelerators are crucial in fields like mass spectrometry for analyzing isotopes.12

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2 Britannica Sources
  1. mass spectrometry - Operation of the tandem electrostatic accelerator
  2. particle accelerator - Van de Graaff generators

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