In Sloane Physics Laboratory, there’s a narrow staircase with an ornate, black-painted hand railing that descends to a dimly lit sub-basement. From there, a hard right turn leads into a warren of interconnected rooms appointed with hand tools, electronics, and tables.
That’s where you’ll find Paul Noel teaching Yale students how to perturb protons.
Noel, recently named manager of instructional labs for the Department of Physics, is Yale’s guru of the Van de Graaff Teaching Accelerator. He guides small groups of undergraduates through the process of measuring subatomic particles and collecting data points with the 69-year-old machine.
He does this with a low-key — but steady — mix of practical tips and light-hearted quips.
“In physics, as with most things, it’s best to look at limiting cases,” he says to a group of five students, when one of them asks how long it may take to retrieve enough usable data points. “I’m assuming you all want to finish this class in three hours, and not just before the death of the sun.”
Noel and his machine are just getting warmed up.
The Van de Graaff accelerator delivers a beautiful energy beam, by all accounts. In a three-second burst, it can send a passel of protons (about 1011) flying forward. And while that may be of limited use to some folks, it is of great use to physicists, engineers, biologists, medical researchers, and manufacturers, who use particle accelerators for everything from making smartphones to treating cancer.
Yale acquired the particle accelerator in 1972 and dedicated it in 1978. For much of its time on campus, it operated in the figurative shadow of the (much larger) tandem Van de Graaff accelerator which did its atom smashing at Wright Laboratory. That machine, activated in 1987, stopped operations in 2011 and was removed several years later.
But make no mistake. The smaller Van de Graaff is no scientific slouch, delivering hands-on data-gathering experiences to students taking a variety of Yale classes, including “Modern Physical Measurement” (PHYS 2060L) and “Advanced Physical Laboratory” (PHYS 4450L).
And Noel is there for all of it.
“Paul is a national treasure,” says Sarah Demers, professor and chair of the Department of Physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “He’s one of our unsung heroes. It’s a bit unusual for a department to have an accelerator in the first place, and Paul operates it dozens of times a semester, teaching students how to take data.”
Noel has been at Yale for 11 years. Originally from Michigan, he worked at a variety of jobs, from Michigan steelworker to Washington, D.C. patent office scientist to North Dakota educator. It was the latter job where he found his calling, he said.
At Yale, Noel helped develop and teach 40 experiments in the university’s teaching labs. They’re all interesting, he said, but the particle accelerator experiments are in a class by themselves.
“When that beam shows up on the display screen, students get excited,” he said. “They’ll stop and take a picture of it with their phone.”
On one recent day, Noel showed five undergraduates how to use the accelerator. The three-hour session began with a detailed overview of the machine itself, from the injector that loads up ionized particles, to the electromagnets that guide and focus the beam, and the two detectors that take measurements.
“It’s super cool to be able to use all this equipment,” said Jackson Hoffman, a first-year student from Los Angeles. “An accelerator isn’t something you get to use every day.”
In a separate room, away from the accelerator room students operated a series of knobs and switches to gather in data. They adjusted the beam’s angle; they isolated protons that were in a direct line with each other, within the beam; and they grabbed a measurement.
Hoffman went first. His first attempt got a bit wonky, but his second try was successful. “How does that feel?” Noel asked.
“Amazing,” Hoffman said.
Eventually, the students were ready to direct their energy beam into the accelerator’s target chamber. Noel walked back into the accelerator room by himself to check on the machine. “Just remember, we want to adjust our energy, but we don’t want to get irradiated,” he said.
As part of their class, these students have visited multiple labs on campus. “It’s a lot of work but I like it so much,” said Swarna Navaratnam-Tomayko, a first-year student who also works with Yale physicist Reina Maruyama. “Even if I don’t end up working with stuff exactly like this, the problem-solving skills I learn here will help me.”
For sophomore Aaron Parr of Chapin, South Carolina, the historical significance of 20th century particle accelerators was also compelling. “These are classic physics experiments,” he said. “It’s how they honed-in on the structure of the atom.”
Noel has consulted the original, 1950s-era manuals for the machine (it was built in Massachusetts in 1957) numerous times over the past decade. He has also made gradual upgrades to the lab with new electronic components.
He sees the accelerator as a powerful tool for training tomorrow’s physics innovators and connecting them to the tangible accomplishments of their predecessors.
“Our students are doing the same analyses that professional scientists do every day, with professional equipment,” he says. “I think it’s fun to have these little alcoves of advanced technology around campus.”
This story is a duplicate of the Yale News story of May 8, 2026, by Jim Shelton. See below for a link to the original article.