Friday, March 18, 2016

The LHC is restarting

The LHC, last among all of CERN’s accelerators, is resuming operation with beam while this issue goes to press. The year-end technical stop (YETS) started on 14 December 2015. During the 11 weeks of scheduled maintenance activities, several interventions have taken place in all of the accelerators and beamlines. They included the maintenance of the cryogenic system at several points; the replacement of 18 magnets in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS); an extensive campaign to identify and remove thousands of obsolete cables; the replacement of the LHC beam absorbers for injection (TDIs) that are used to absorb the SPS beam if a problem occurs, providing vital protection for the LHC; and 12 LHC collimators have been dismantled and reinstalled after modification of the vacuum chambers, which restricted their movement.
 

Monday, February 1, 2016

The Future of Thin Film Control

http://www.xtronix.ch/qcm.htm

Eon-ID™ is a new film thickness controller that packages an ultra-high resolution deposition control system into a compact, rack-mountable enclosure.

Featuring integrated display, intuitive GUI, and durable architecture, Eon-ID™ offers an all-inclusive design that adapts easily to a variety of settings – ranging from industrial to laboratory to clean room to research environments. Eon-ID™ integrates well into existing rack thin film systems.

Monday, December 7, 2015

ORNL process could be white lightning to electronics industry

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 1, 2015 – A new era of electronics and even quantum devices could be ushered in with the fabrication of a virtually perfect single layer of “white graphene,” according to researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
 
The material, technically known as hexagonal boron nitride, features better transparency than its sister, graphene, is chemically inert, or non-reactive, and atomically smooth. It also features high mechanical strength and thermal conductivity. Unlike graphene, however, it is an insulator instead of a conductor of electricity, making it useful as a substrate and the foundation for the electronics in cell phones, laptops, tablets and many other devices.
 
“Imagine batteries, capacitors, solar cells, video screens and fuel cells as thin as a piece of paper,” said ORNL’s Yijing Stehle, postdoctoral associate and lead author of a paper published in Chemistry of Materials. She and colleagues are also working on a graphene hexagonal boron 2-D capacitor and fuel cell prototype that are not only “super thin” but also transparent.
 
With their recipe for white graphene, ORNL researchers hope to unleash the full potential of graphene, which has not delivered performance consistent with its theoretical value. With white graphene as a substrate, researchers believe they can help solve the problem while further reducing the thickness and increasing the flexibility of electronic devices.
 

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Applications for the CryoLab cryocooler

Measurements at cryogenic temperatures were never this easy!

We recently launched a new line of plug-n-play desktop cryocoolers for applications requiring cooling of small samples to 90 K or further down to 75 K (i.e. SQUIDs).


http://www.xtronix.ch/cryolab.htm

 
Known as CryoLab, by Kryoz Technologies of Holland, the LN2-free low-temperature analysis cooling systems allow for  characterisation measurements from room temperature down to cryogenics in a fully automated manner. Doing measurements doesn’t require any experience or know-how on cryogenics, vacuum technology or thermodynamics from the user.

 
 http://www.xtronix.ch/cryolab.htm
 
 

Friday, April 17, 2015

Time Measurements with CAEN Waveform Digitizers

In this new Application Note we focus our attention on the techniques for time measurement using waveform Digitizer. It describes the algorithms typically used for these measurements and the performances obtained in some benchmark tests using different acquistion setup. This note shows that Digitizers are capable to measure time stamps with higher accuracy (few ps resolution) compared to commercial analog solution composed by CFD and TDC modules.
 
Traditional analog devices as the Constant Fraction Discriminators (CFDs) and Time to Digital Converters (TDCs) can be very competitive in terms of channel density and cost. Highly segmented detectors are therefore often read out by analog devices featuring custom made specification to guarantee a perfect match with the experimental requirements. However the possible requirement of simultaneous measurement of energy and time poses the practical issue of complex device connections.

In some applications the implementation of a digitizer for time measurements is profitable or even necessary:
  • Applications that require an excellent timing resolution of the whole chain, of the order of few ps
  • Simultaneous acquisition of time and energy information
  • Online walk correction with integrated charge or amplitude
  • Bursts of very close pulses (e.g. Free Electron Lasers)

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

A multi-detector, digitizer based neutron depth profiling device for characterizing thin film materials

P. L. Mulligan, L. R. Cao,a) and D. Turkoglu 

Nuclear Engineering Program, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA
 
Abstract
Neutron depth profiling (NDP) is a mature, nondestructive technique used to characterize the concentration of certain light isotopes in a material as a function of depth by measuring the residual energy of charged particles in neutron induced reactions. Historically, NDP has been performed using a single detector, resulting in low intrinsic detection efficiency, and limiting the technique largely to high flux research reactors. In this work, we describe a new NDP instrument design with higher detection efficiency by way of spectrum summing across multiple detectors. Such a design is capable of acquiring a statistically significant charged particle spectrum at facilities limited in neutron flux and operation time.
 
Click to view complete article
 

Friday, October 17, 2014

Upgrade set for dark-matter detector

The XENON1T water tank

By Gemma Lavender

A vast upgrade to the XENON dark-matter experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy is set to provide a significant increase in sensitivity by being able to better spot cosmic rays masquerading as dark-matter particles. Costing US$11m and expected to start taking data in 2015, XENON1T will contain one tonne of xenon to hunt for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) – a leading dark-matter contender.
 
The XENON detector contains 100 kg of xenon and has provided the world's best limits on the collisional cross-sections between WIMPs and xenon atoms within the detector. But despite the laboratory being situated deep underground to block out most other particles, stray neutrons produced by the decay of cosmic-ray muons can still enter the detector and produce "false positives". Because the signal from the WIMPs, if they exist, will be weak, these false positives could obscure the real signal.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Pulse Shape Discrimination between neutrons and gamma rays in liquid scintillator

In this new Application Note (AN3250) Pulse Shape Discrimination between neutrons and gamma rays in liquid scintillators is studied by using DPP-PSD firmware running on CAEN digitizers. The dependence of the Figure of Merit on the digitizer sampling rate and resolution is experimentally determined.
Based on "Pulse shape discrimination with fast digitizers", L. Stevanato et al, NIMA 748 (2014) 33-38, DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2014.02.032

For the measurements reported in this application note, a liquid scintillator coupled to a 12 dynode photo-multiplier (PMT) has been used. The anode signal was directly processed by a set of CAEN digitizers running DPP-PSD firmware:

Monday, June 23, 2014

Solid Sealing Technology Celebrates 10 Years of Excellence

In 2014, Solid Sealing Technology is happy to celebrate its ten year anniversary as a designer and manufacturer of highly engineered, hermetic products through metalizing and brazing, glass-ceramic sealing, welding and critical mechanical assembly.

Since its inception in 2004, Solid Sealing Technology has been a global provider of industry standard and custom designed products and has continually been committed to serve its customers in the high-tech market place. 
 
Throughout Solid Sealing Technology's past ten years as a member of the Watervliet Arsenal Business & Technology Partnership, the company has continually reached new heights in the manufacturing industry. Solid Sealing Technology's growth and success stems from the company's dedicated workforce and the company's awareness of the latest technology. Solid Sealing Technology has focused on delivering "Solid" Customer Service, Rapid Response, On Target Quality and Superior Customer Value over the past ten years and plans to build and strengthen these areas in the future.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

What's all the buzz about the GECO2020, and what exactly is it ?!

 GECO2020 is the all new CAEN General Control Software for over 250 High Voltage and Low Voltage Boards and Systems.
              
It features:
  • Innovative GUI
  • Dashboard capability:Allows to manage all the CAEN Power Supplies in any form factor
  • Supports Linux & Windows
  • Handles all the communication links provided in CAEN Power Supplies:
    • Ethernet
    • USB
    • Optical Link
    • Wi-Fi
GECO2020 brings the High Voltage control and management via external Host PC to an unprecedented level of easiness and compatibility.
 

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Smaller accelerators for particle physics?

It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 27 km (16.8 mile) length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.

That is the promise of laser-plasma accelerators, which use lasers instead of high-power radio-frequency waves to energize electrons in very short distances. Scientists have grappled with building these devices for two decades, and a new theoretical study predicts that this may be easier than previously thought.
 
The authors are Carlo Benedetti, Carl Schroeder, Eric Esarey, and Wim Leemans, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center. Their paper, "Plasma wakefields driven by an incoherent combination of laser pulses: A path towards high-average power laser-plasma accelerators," appears in the May Special Issue of Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing.
 
 
 

Thursday, May 8, 2014

CAEN MC2 Analyzer officially released!

The CAEN MC2 Analyzer has been specifically designed for digitizers running the Digital Pulse Processing for the Pulse Height Analysis (DPP-PHA) firmware as the DT5780 Dual Digital MCA. This software is able to completely control and manage a set of boards acquiring data simultaneously, making therefore a multi-board system a "Multichannel - Multichannel Analyzer".

MC2 Analyzer allows the user to set all the relevant DPP-PHA parameters for each acquisition channel (trigger threshold, trapezoidal filter parameters, etc.), handle the communication with the connected boards, run the data acquisition and plot both waveforms for on-line monitoring of the acquisition and histograms. It can also control the HV power supplies provided in DT5780. Moreover, it is able to perform advanced mathematical analysis on both the online and collected spectra: peak search, background subtraction, peak fitting, energy calibration, ROI selection, dead time compensation, histogram rebin and other features available.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Digital Neutron-Gamma discrimination with Liquid Scintillators

In recent years CAEN has developed a complete family of digitizers that consists of several models differing in sampling frequency, resolution, form factor and other features. Besides the use of the digitizers as waveform recorders (oscilloscope mode), CAEN offers the possibility to upload special versions of the FPGA firmware that implement algorithms for the Digital Pulse Processing (DPP); when the digitizer runs in DPP mode, it becomes a new instrument that represents a complete digital replacement of most traditional modules such as Multi-Channel Analyzers (MCAs), QDCs, TDCs, Discriminators and many others. In this application note, CAEN describes the capability of the series x720 (12 bit, 250MSps) to perform neutron-gamma discrimination based upon the digital pulse shape analysis. The development of this FPGA firmware was based upon liquid scintillating detectors of type BC501-A.
 
All detector and neutron/gamma source based tests were performed at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) on the campus of the Duke University in collaboration with Prof. Mohammad W. Ahmed.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

About Ruthenium Oxide Temperature Sensors

Ruthenium Oxide Temperature Sensors are thick film resistors which are interchangeable and usable in large magnetic fields with excellent accuracy without special calibration. These sensors are available as uncalibrated, grouped, or calibrated (Fig. 1) units at reasonable cost.

FEATURES:
Excellent Magnetic Field Performance
Interchangeability
Repeatability
Fast Thermal Response
Rugged
Temperature Range: .05°K to 20°K. Custom ranges available, contact X-TRONIX.

PHYSICAL SPECIFICATIONS:
Gold plated OFHC copper enclosure, Dia . . 093" (2.4mm) x Length .200" (5. lmm)
Phosphor-bronze lead wire-standard, 4-Leaded, Polyimide coated, 36 AWG, Custom leads available
 

Friday, March 21, 2014

Next Generation Crystal Microbalances for Thin Film Deposition Monitoring & Control

by Scott Grimshaw, Colnatec USA

The "Achilles heel" of thin film deposition process monitoring and control is the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM). Since its advent in the 1960's, QCM's have been an integral part of most commercial thin film coating systems. Unfortunately, the limitations of QCM's for processes such as optical coating, ion beam sputtering, MBE and CVD have not been adequately addressed.
 
A new class of QCM sensor, designed for elevated temperatures, high stress dielectrics and extremely thin coatings is now available. This new sensor embodies an advanced crystallographic cut, "smart" sensor housings with integrated heaters, and novel crystal materials to extend the range of thin film monitoring to up to 250°C. 

INTRODUCTION
Quartz crystal microbalances operate in a relatively simple fashion. The QCM consists of a disc of quartz cut at a specific angle and shape from a bar of synthetically grown quartz. This quartz disc is then coupled into an electrical circuit and caused to vibrate at its natural resonance frequency. The resonance changes (decreases in frequency) whenever a thin film coating collects on the crystal surface. If the density of the film material is known, an algorithm can be used to compute the film thickness. 

Sunday, March 9, 2014

13th Int. Conference on Muon Spin Rotation, Relaxation & Resonance

June 1-6, 2014. The 13th International Conference on Muon Spin Rotation, Relaxation and Resonance (μSR2014) is to be held in Grindelwald, Switzerland, from Sunday, June 1st to Friday, June 6th, 2014. It is organized by the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), the University of Zurich and the University of Fribourg.
 
The conference provides a forum to researchers from around the world with interests in the applications of μSR to study a wide range of topics including condensed matter physics, materials and molecular sciences, chemistry and biology. The Conference will consist of invited and contributed talks as well as poster sessions.
 

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Wafer-scale design of lightweight and transparent electronics that wraps around hairs

ETH Zürich contributors: Giovanni A. Salvatore, Niko Münzenrieder, Thomas Kinkeldei, Luisa Petti, Christoph Zysset, Ivo Strebel, Lars Büthe & Gerhard Tröster
A new way of making ultra thin, flexible and transparent electronics has been unveiled by researchers in Switzerland. The technique involves fabricating micron-thick electronic devices on a conventional silicon wafer, which is later detached by soaking it in water. The free-floating devices can then be placed onto a variety of biological tissues, including human skin and even a single hair. The technology could be used to make "smart" contact lenses for monitoring the pressure in an eyeball or for creating flexible solar cells.

Energy Resolution & Linearity of the CAEN MCA DT5780

The Digital Multi Channel Analyzer DT5780 represents the synthesis of CAEN's long lasting experience in high voltage power supplies and in digital acquisition systems. The device houses two HV channels with ±5 kV maximum voltage and two 14 bit acquisition channels with 100 MS/s sampling rate. The device allows through its internal logic to require coincidences and anti‐coincidences between events triggered by the two acquisition channels.

In the present Application Note we report the results obtained in internal tests of the Digital Multi Channel Analyzer DT5780. We are going to show the resolution of the energy measurement of gamma and X rays obtained with a HPGe detector. The wide spectrum of energy available allows also to obtain a preliminary test of the linearity of our MCA. We want underline that this test is preliminary and does not take into account the nonlinearity of the HPGe detector and the preamplifier, and possible dependencies on the event acquisition rate.

Click to download application note PDF

Click for technical details on DT5780
 

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Powerful Solution for the Emulation of Any Detection Setup

The Digital Detector Emulator is a multichannel instrument for the emulation of radiation detection systems. The algorithm is initialized by a reference pulse shape, with statistical distribution of amplitude and time. Then a statistical stream of events is generated according to the input distributions. The events can be also selectively summed together simulating the pile-up phenomenon. An arbitrarily generated noise and a baseline drift can be superimposed to each pulse.

Therefore, the instrument is not a pulse generator of recorded shapes, but it is a synthesizer of random pulses compliant with programmable statistical distributions of energy spectrum, time distribution, and pulse shape. The stream of emulated signals becomes a statistical sequence of pulses, reflecting the programmed input features (e.g. energy spectrum, time distribution, noise, signal shape, etc.). When the emulation process is reset, the kernels of generators can be either re-initialized with new random data making the sequence always different, or they can be stored to reproduce the same sequence many times.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Krytox® PFPE in Vacuum Applications

Krytox® performance lubricants are the products of choice for applications where complete nonflammability, oxygen compatibility, and resistance to aggressive chemicals are requirements. These synthetic lubricants provide superior performance and extended life as lubricants and sealants.

xtronix caters to a variety of vacuum and non-vacuum applications with different grades of Krytox® oils and greases. We have addressed aerospace related markets, high voltage industrial applications, paper mills, tribology applications in clean room environments, and many others.

An important area of use for Krytox® relates to vacuum-based applications:
• Vacuum pumps, where safety is critical
• Hostile environments, where semiconductor process chemicals can attack most other lubricants
• Vacuum system valves, seals, bearings and connectors, where low vapor pressure, outgassing, and contamination are intolerable
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