About NEC

NEC Acceleration Tube

National Electrostatics Corporation (NEC) is the world's leader in the manufacture of electrostatic ion beam accelerator systems. A private, employee-owned company, NEC was incorporated in Middleton, Wisconsin in 1965 and now has over 90 employees including electrical and mechanical engineers, ion beam system technicians, craftsmen, and other skilled workers. Five of our employees hold doctorates in fields related to ion beam research and design.

NEC employees pride themselves on making a wide variety of Pelletron ® accelerator systems to meet customers' needs. To date we have manufactured about 175 Pelletron systems with sales in 44 countries throughout the world. These systems produce ion beams of essentially all stable nuclei with energies ranging from a few keV to hundreds of MeV. The Pelletron is still the world's only commercially available accelerator which incorporates an all metal and ceramic acceleration tube with no organic material in the vacuum volume.

Pelletron Charging Chain
Pelletron systems range in size and configuration from the highly versatile 25 million volt tandem Pelletron at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the world's highest voltage accelerator), to dedicated analytical instruments using MeV ion beam technology. MeV ion beam instruments are available for standard RBS analysis, channeling RBS, PIXE, micro PIXE and micro RBS, very high-sensitivity accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and a wide variety of other materials analysis techniques.

The Pelletron gets its name from the metal pellet charging chains which are highly efficient, provide long life, need little maintenance and provide extremely stable terminal voltage conditions.

A wide range of vacuum components and beam handling components has also been developed with the Pelletron accelerators over the last 40 years. Ion sources, vibration isolators for vacuum pumps, Faraday cups, beam profile monitors, and many other components have proven to be reliable with extensive use in 44 countries. See our Publications List.

Covering 5,860 square meters the NEC complex, located approximately 20 minutes from the Madison, Wisconsin airport, includes both manual and numerically controlled machine shops, a complete metal/ceramic bonding facility, vacuum components and electrical components assembly areas, as well as space for extensive testing of Pelletron accelerator systems and material analysis instruments.

Tutorials describing ion sources, Pelletron accelerators, the charging chain and an analytical endstation are available.

For orders, inquiries, comments and more information about our products, please contact our sales department at nec@pelletron.com

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