When a magician tells you there’s nothing under his sleeve, you’re invited to look beyond the sweat on your arms and dirty air for the card or bunny hiding inside.
But when manufacturers of high-quality microchips say there’s nothing in their vacuum, you really have to believe them. Hair, dust particles or even contaminants are enough to destroy complex technology.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has now validated a process they have been working on for accurately measuring extremely low gas pressures in confined spaces, offering industry and researchers a new way to do just about anything.
Trying to expel every particle of gas out of the container quickly becomes a stupid task. Some stubborn and lost people will surely remain. However, if they come under collective pressure less than 0.000001 Pa (about one trillionth of an atmosphere), we can call it a supervacuum using the Cold Atomic Vacuum Standard (CAVS).
Get accurate and reliable measurements of this vacuum level hard thingusually depends on device used the remaining gas molecules as starting points for electrons, or charge them and collect ionized particles for counting.
However, the researchers wondered if the limitations of experiments involving laser-cooled atoms could be turned into a useful tool for detecting and quantifying the atmospheric remnants left in the vacuum of space.
Cold, uncharged metal atoms are caught in a magnetic trap often suffer Annoying problem – flying gas particles can knock them out of their cage. On the other hand, measuring the loss of these atoms can provide a fairly reliable indication of the concentration of high-speed particles in their environment.
By attaching a magnetic trap containing about a thousand lithium or rubidium atoms to a vacuum, NIST researchers have shown that it is possible to continuously measure pressure in the ultra-high vacuum range, creating a new type of CAVS sensor.
Although they’ve been tinkering with the device for the last seven years, the team recently connected their new CAVS technology to a system that can continuously leak tens of billions of particles into a room per second.
To verify the accuracy of the Cold Atomic Vacuum Standard (CAVS) in measuring very low vacuum pressures, NIST researchers created a high-performance version of a conventional pressure measuring setup known as a dynamic expansion system. (nest)
By comparing the standard size of particles entering the chamber with measurements on the innovative CAVS sensor, the team showed that their method is not just a zero point; It is far simpler than anything that has ever been produced before.
And without requiring calibration, it’s actually a standard vacuum gauge.
“In fact, the portable version is so simple, we finally decided to automate it so we don’t have to interrupt its operation.” He said NIST physicist Dan Parker.
“In fact, most of the data from the portable CAVS for this study was taken while we were in deep sleep at home.”
It may not seem like magic, but for the cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturer or researcher who relies on a vacuum cleaner to study everything from gravitational waves To turn quantum chaos into nothingness, new technology could be just what they need to ensure that they have almost nothing left.
This research was published in AVS Quantum Science.
2023-08-24 06:05:31
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