BC funding helps complete ARIEL accelerator facility

On October 6, 2016, the BC government announced an $8.7 million investment in a national initiative to bolster Canada’s world-class rare isotope capabilities. The contribution from the BC Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) supports TRIUMF’s Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL), a two-phase multidisciplinary research facility.

The ARIEL initiative is led by the University of Victoria (UVic), with 18 additional collaborating university partners from across Canada. In addition to the BC investment, ARIEL is supported by contributions from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

Rare isotopes are powerful tools for scientific discovery with a broad range of real-life applications from medicine and life sciences to advanced industrial manufacturing. To fully understand the properties of rare isotopes requires unique techniques and tools such as those being developed with ARIEL. Rare isotopes are not typically found in nature; they’re produced by particle accelerators in a handful of laboratories around the world, such as TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science.

With the addition of ARIEL, TRIUMF will significantly increase its scientific productivity and the impact of its rare isotope program. ARIEL will be globally competitive and deploy next-generation technologies to deliver a variety of isotopes to multiple experiments simultaneously. This new degree of flexibility will provide TRIUMF users with increased capacity to support research and innovation.

Read the media release.