TRIUMF: the home of Canadian subatomic physics

The acronym for Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, TRIUMF, was out of date almost as soon as it was coined. Derived from "TRI-University Meson Facility", it reflected the three universities - British Columbia, Victoria and Simon Fraser that initially conceived the Vancouver laboratory in 1965. Well before the proposal was approved in 1968, however, the University of Alberta had come on board, and today 11 Canadian universities belong to the TRIUMF club. The remainder of the acronym has also become rather misleading, since TRIUMF is now more than a meson facility. The laboratory's current activities include operating the radioactive beam facility, ISAC, and the coordination of Canada's role in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN. The TRIUMF cyclotron was built under the guidance of J Reginald Richardson, who studied under Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley. It produced its first beam in 1974. The cyclotron is literally at the heart of the laboratory, with a meson hall to one side and a proton hall to the other. It was the first cyclotron in the world to provide two extracted beams simultaneously at different energies. Today, it provides four beams supplying experiments in particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics, materials science, and a range of medical and industrial applications.