Argonne History Understanding the Physical Universe M uch of the understanding of nuclear fission came from the work of physicists at the Metallurgical Laboratory and at Argonne. Argonne scientists led the country's basic research effort in support of reactors. The world's first superconducting linear accelerator for nuclear research was a major advance in accelerator technology.
Acceleration is provided by superconducting resonators.
This makes possible high-quality ion beams over a broad range of projectile energy and mass, spanning the energy domains in which nuclear structure effects are particularly important. Its beam intensity was increased 100-fold in 1988 which permitted acceleration of ions as heavy as uranium to energies as high as 1.9 billion electron volts. In 1948, an Argonne scientist reasoned that the atomic nucleus consisted of protons and neutrons arranged in a shell. Her invention of the nuclear shell model provided a working theoretical infrastructure for studying the properties of atomic nuclei and earned her a share of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963. Other Argonne scientists developed and extended the shell model to make it applicable to a wide range of nuclei.