South Korea has become the world’s eighth country to successfully test a superconducting quarter-wave resonator(QWR), a key component of heavy-ion accelerators.
 
The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said on Monday that the Institute for Basic Science approved the superconducting QWR after testing the component in April and last month.

Superconducting QWRs help accelerate heavy ion close to the speed of light, or 300-thousand kilometers per second. 

Only seven other countries have conducted successful tests of superconducting QWRs before, including the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, China and Japan.
 
South Korea is working on a project, named RAON, to develop a heavy-ion accelerator by 2021. Heavy-ion accelerator can be used in advanced physics-related experiments.