Vacuum Technology - Gallery

Looking at a plasma in vacuum, courtesy of Norbert Koster (TNO)



Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
The main spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment is contained in a large vacuum chamber (10 m diameter and 23 m long). KATRIN was designed to measure the mass of the neutrino directly with a sensitivity of 0.2 eV. Although the chamber was both built and installed in Germany, a land-and-sea journey of 9000 km was required to get it to its final destination in 2006. Near the end of that journey the chamber squeezed through the village of Leopoldshafen.



Maximilien Brice © CERN
A superconducting radio-frequency cavity in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. Such cavities are located intermittently along the beam pipe to accelerate the particle beam inside the pipe. A vacuum of about 10-8 Pa (10-10 Torr) is required.



ICx Technologies
This carbon dioxide sensor contains a hot filament that both generates narrowband infrared radiation and acts as a narrowband infrared bolometer detector. The MEMS chip was encapsulated with a pressure below 1 Pa (0.01 Torr).



NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ion engines must be tested in a large vacuum chamber. This engine was used on Deep Space 1, the probe that visited Comet Borrelly in 2001. The blue glow is ionized xenon that was electrostatically accelerated through a potential of 1280 V and emitted from the 30 cm thruster through a pair of molybdenum grids. The maximum power of 2.3 kW produced a thrust of 92 mN.