Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory at RIKEN (RIBF)

The RIKEN RI Beam Factory (RIBF) has started its operation after ten years of construction [1]. It is designed to provide beams of various kinds of unstable nuclei with the world's highest intensities. The institute RIKEN was founded in 1917, and covers a variety of research fields such as physics, chemistry, medical science, biology, and engineering. RIKEN has a long history of constructing accelerators. The first cyclotron in Japan was built in 1937 by Yoshio Nishina in the former RIKEN campus, and the RIKEN's 4th cyclotron completed in 1966 was the first heavy-ion cyclotron in Japan, which accelerated light nuclei to the energy around 7 MeV/nucleon.