Our history includes state of the art research labs and notable scientific figures! The 1951 Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (1903–1995) lectured in physics for three months in the fall of 1975 at UNT. The department's Ion Beam and Modification Analysis Laboratory houses four active linear particle accelerators. The lab is among the more sophisticated ion beam facilities in the country. Three of the accelerators are housed in a 450 square-meter, ultra-clean, microbeam, raster-scanning, depth-profiling, Cs-sputtering ion source laboratory, one being a 3 million volt tandem Pelletron accelerator, Model 9-SDH, delveloped by National Electrostatics Corporation, and installed at North Texas in December 1989. It is the workhouse of the laboratory and is used for trace element analysis via accelerator mass spectroscopy. One of the older accelerators, a 2.5 MV, is used for routine PIXE, RBS, and NRA and for advanced undergraduate and first year graduate student laboratory experiments. A smaller laboratory, 78-square-meters, houses a 200 kilovolt Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and a 2.5 megavolt Van de Graaff. North Texas is also the host of the International Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry, held every November.
