Cockcroft–Walton generator

The Cockcroft–Walton (CW) generator, or multiplier, is an electric circuit that generates a high DC voltage from a low-voltage AC or pulsing DC input. It was named after the British and Irish physicists John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, who in 1932 used this circuit design to power their particle accelerator, performing the first artificial nuclear disintegration in history. They used this voltage multiplier cascade for most of their research, which in 1951 won them the Nobel Prize in Physics for "Transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles".

This Cockcroft–Walton particle accelerator was used during the development of the atomic bomb. Built in 1937 by Philips of Eindhoven it is now in the National Science Museum in London, England.

750 kV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator used as the initial particle injector of the Japanese KEK accelerator, Tsukuba, Japan. The CW generator is on the right, the particle source is on the left.

The circuit was developed in 1919, by Heinrich Greinacher, a Swiss physicist. For this reason, this doubler cascade is sometimes also referred to as the Greinacher multiplier. Cockcroft–Walton circuits are still used in particle accelerators. They also are used in everyday electronic devices that require high voltages, such as X-ray machines and photocopiers.

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