G&E Tandems started the way most of our best ideas do — as something that sounded a little crazy. 

I had been building accelerator hardware for years — deep into my 500 kV tandem project at RIT, spending most of my time in CAD and machine shops designing ion sources, accelerating columns, and vacuum systems. My brother Gianni is an electrician and mechanic. Between the two of us, we had a strange but useful combination of skills: I understood the accelerator physics, he understood how to actually rig heavy equipment without breaking it.

When Arizona State University listed their IBeAM facility at auction — a complete 1.7 MV General Ionex Tandetron system — we saw an opportunity that nobody else in our position would have considered reasonable. We bought it.

The Extraction Story

What followed was one of the most intense experiences of our lives. 

The system was still under high vacuum when we arrived. The lab was roughly 1,500 square feet of tightly packed accelerator hardware, beamlines, electronics racks, cabling, and decades of accumulated experimental infrastructure. The original operator had moved on from the university, so we had to piece together the system's configuration largely through our own technical knowledge, manufacturer documentation, and contacts through the SNEAP community. 

Over three week-long trips to Arizona, Gianni and I disassembled the entire facility by hand. We removed every beamline component, disconnected and labeled hundreds of electrical connections, and carefully extracted the Cockcroft-Walton high-voltage multiplier from inside the SF₆ pressure vessel. We documented everything — every cable, every vacuum fitting, every configuration. 

The hardest part was the accelerating column. Fourteen feet of floating glass tube sections, bonded to precision metal electrodes, embrittled after forty years of particle irradiation. Only one person we could find through the SNEAP community had ever attempted this extraction themselves, and their column broke. We spent days researching, designing custom support jigs, and building adjustable tables before attempting it. The extraction and column disassembly took sixteen hours straight, but we got it out intact.

Rigging and Team Management

The final phase required coordinating a professional rigging crew to disassemble and boom-crane the five-ton SF₆ tank out of a basement lab. Meanwhile, Gianni and I managed a team of about fifteen people over two days, running parallel workflows: crating delicate components, palletizing heavy hardware, labeling everything for transport, and making sure nobody got hurt moving oddly shaped, extremely expensive equipment through tight doorways. 

We went from a room you could barely walk through to completely empty — without breaking a single component in two days. The entire operation came in exactly on the budget we had estimated months earlier, which required every dollar both of us had.

What we Have Now

That experience is what G&E Tandems is built on. 

We didn't start this company because we wanted to flip surplus lab equipment. We started it because we are accelerator people who happened to acquire a complete, well-documented tandem accelerator system — and we have the technical depth to evaluate, present, and support it properly. 

The 1.7 MV Tandetron is a General Ionex (now HVEE) tandem electrostatic accelerator. It was originally operated at Bell Labs, then relocated to Arizona State University where it ran for decades doing ion beam analysis. The Cockcroft-Walton multiplier was recently serviced with upgraded RF driver oscillators. The system includes two ion sources — an NEC Alphatross and a General Ionex cesium sputter source — covering species from hydrogen through gold, with beam currents ranging from femtoamps to over 400 nA. Three beamlines were configured for RBS, PIXE, and five-axis microprobe work. 

We maintain full lifetime operation logs, original engineering documentation, and direct contact with both former operators. The system is available as a complete platform, individual subsystems, or as components.

Our Philosophy

Large accelerator systems represent decades of engineering development. Too often, they get retired because of funding cycles, facility closures, or institutional restructuring — not because the hardware has stopped being useful. A well-maintained tandem accelerator can run for many decades. The physics doesn't expire. 

G&E Tandems exists to keep these machines in the research ecosystem. We recover complete accelerator platforms and work to place them with universities, national facilities, and industrial research groups that need beam infrastructure but don't have the budget or timeline to buy new. 

This isn't abstract to us. I've been building my own accelerator since high school. I know what it's like to need beam time and not have access. I know how transformative a working accelerator can be for a research program — especially a smaller one that's trying to punch above its weight. That's the kind of lab we want to help.

Contact Us

If you're interested in the 1.7 MV Tandetron system — or if you know of accelerator infrastructure that's headed for decommissioning — we'd like to hear from you. We're always happy to talk accelerators. 

enzo@getandems.com
(860) 391-1110