ANU, Canberra
Electrostatic accelerator laboratories were the nurseries for the heavy ion physics research of today and the accelerators this research needed. The first conference, of what has evolved into the HIAT series, was the "International Conference on the Technology of Electrostatic Accelerators" hosted by the Daresbury Laboratory in 1973. While some of the founding labs of this series have ceased doing accelerator based physics, electrostatic accelerators still inject beams into present day heavy ion boosters. Electrostatic accelerators also continue to provide beams for nuclear and applied physics in laboratories with and without boosters. The development of electrostatic accelerators remains active and will continue in the next few years. The improvements have been spurred by injection beam requirements of boosters as well as the special transmission and stability needs of accelerator mass spectrometry. The survey of the electrostatic accelerator community presented here, has identified a broad range of improvements and uses as well as future technical directions for electrostatic accelerators.
