Physics professor Dr. Chary Rangacharyulu (PhD) first worked with the linac as a post-doctoral fellow in 1979. (Photo: Chris Putnam)
The presence of the linac and the community of experts that grew around it was eventually a deciding factor in USask being chosen as the site for the CLS. The CLS was built directly onto the linac and designed to accelerate the linac’s 250 million electronvolt beam up to 2.9 billion electronvolts, where it gives off highly useful synchrotron light.
“You’re basically limited by your imagination what you can do with that light,” said Boland.
The addition of the CLS expanded the linac’s research scope from the nuclei of atoms to matter on a larger scale. Discoveries about everything from battery technology to medicine, dinosaur bones and famous works of art are just a few of the achievements made possible by the CLS since it opened in 2005.
Boland, who came to USask from Australia in 2017 because of the opportunities the CLS offered, notes that much of the research at the synchrotron has a direct lineage to the spectroscopy work of famed former USask physics professor Dr. Gerhard Herzberg (PhD).
“If Herzberg could come and look at the work being done here, he could see his Nobel Prize-winning work being applied here at the Canadian Light Source,” Boland said.
That lineage will continue with the installation of the new linac. As for the original linac, it is not destined for the scrapheap. The CLS is talking to museums and the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics about putting pieces of the old linac on permanent public display. Some parts of the device have also been shipped overseas to be used in the Swiss Free Electron Laser, a linac-based light source in Switzerland.
Boland likes knowing the venerable machine will live on in some way. As someone who worked closely with the old linac for years, he felt something when he watched it be dismantled.
“I’m a sentimentalist at heart, so I did feel that we were losing a bit of something, but we were gaining a lot more,” Boland said.
Rangacharyulu is less romantic.
“Sixty years is a long time for a machine to function . The linac had a good life, and now we move on. Rest in peace, my linac,” he said with a laugh.