The Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) is a research and development unit of the India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n Department of Atomic Energy

Department of Atomic Energy (India)

The Department of Atomic Energy is a department directly under the Prime Minister of India with headquartered in Mumbai. The department is responsible for nuclear technology, including nuclear power and research....

. The VECC, located in Calcutta, India, performs research in basic and applied nuclear sciences. The Centre houses a 224 cm cyclotron

Cyclotron

In technology, a cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. In physics, the cyclotron frequency or gyrofrequency is the frequency of a charged particle moving perpendicularly to the direction of a uniform magnetic field, i.e. a magnetic field of constant magnitude and direction...

—the first of its kind in India—which has been operational since 16 June 1977. It provides proton

Proton

The proton is a subatomic particle with the symbol or and a positive electric charge of 1 elementary charge. One or more protons are present in the nucleus of each atom, along with neutrons. The number of protons in each atom is its atomic number....

, deuteron, alpha particle

Alpha particle

Alpha particles consist of two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle identical to a helium nucleus, which is classically produced in the process of alpha decay, but may be produced also in other ways and given the same name...

 and heavy ion beams of various energies to other institutions.

The Centre is a transit node of ERNET

ERNET

Education and Research Network , India is an autonomous scientific society of Ministry of Communication & information technology . ERNET has made a significant contribution to the emergence of networking in the country...

, handling the electronic mail and Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

facilities for other universities and research institutes.