HARRISONBURG, Va. (AP) - Equipment once used to diagnose and treat patients at the former Rockingham Memorial Hospital is being repurposed for scientific research at James Madison University.
University officials showed off the Madison Accelerator Laboratory at the end of a two-day workshop about ways the lab can be used. The highlight was the low-energy linear particle accelerator, or linac, previously used in radiation therapy in the former hospital building that’s been renovated into Madison Hall.
Adriana Banu, associate professor of physics and astronomy at JMU and one of the people who helped establish MAL, said having a linac will provide undergraduates a rare opportunity to work with the equipment.
It should help the university recruit top physics students out of high school because they’ll be able to learn new skills that directly translate to the operation of larger, more powerful accelerators available to postgraduate students.
“We can partner with a big lab, like (the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News), and we can be a pipeline for these big programs at national laboratories,” Banu said. “At the national laboratories, time is limited for training for this and everything is extremely expensive.”
JMU has spent about $500,000 to get the accelerator lab up and running, she said.
Because the electron linac was built for medical use, JMU must make adjustments to use it for research. Banu said software prevents the machine from being used at higher levels ideal for research because it was set up to avoid harming patients, so ways to work around the programs must be developed.
Lab manager Scottie Pendleton led a tour of MAL, which also includes an X-ray machine previously used by the hospital.
Eric Gorton, a university spokesman, said Sentara RMH Medical Center sold the equipment to JMU at a low cost.
The linac is in a room with walls that are 8 feet thick, Pendleton said. The control console is outside the room so no one is exposed to the high levels of radiation the machine emits.
The primary use for the machine, Banu said, is astrophysics research.
“We want to understand nuclear reactions that happen in stars,” she said. “Photons disintegrate matter. We want to try to reproduce in the laboratory what happens in stars.”
The practical uses for the machine are broad, and the workshop focused on different potential collaborations.
Discussions, according to a news release, indicated that the equipment has applications in nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, nuclear engineering, nuclear forensics, homeland security, accelerator physics, medical physics, materials science, environmental chemistry, geology, biology, astronomy, archaeology and art history.
That’s part of the reason the workshop was held.
While JMU staff and students comprised more than half the workshop’s 28 attendees, staffers from Jefferson Lab, the University of Virginia, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and Duke University and University of North Carolina affiliated with the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory also were on hand.
Also on hand were Haris Dapo, assistant professor at Akdeniz University in Antalya, Turkey, and Stylianos Stoulos, associate professor at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. They work regularly with clinical accelerators and made presentations on their work.
“What’s driving this is astrophysics,” Banu said, “but we want to go beyond that. The idea was to gather as many people in the room that have different ideas of how this can be used.”
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