ANCORP Chamber Stories
One of our most recent builds was a box chamber for Cornell University. Austin Cao from Cornell gave us the following information about this chamber.
“The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) is a National Science Foundation funded facility located on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. CHESS provides high-energy synchrotron X-rays serving over 1300 user visits from the physical, biological, engineering, and life sciences. The 2018 upgrade (CHESS-U) is a major effort utilizing a $15M grant to upgrade the facilities to produce even brighter X-rays.
The Sector 4 Double Crystal Monochromator (DCM) is a device that transmits a mechanically selectable band of wavelengths of radiation. This instrument requires ultra-high vacuum and extreme stability and precision. Because of how small the equipment area is, custom vacuum chambers are often a necessity. The Sector 4 DCM chamber is a custom UHV vacuum chamber that fits precisely into “Sector 4”, an area with a skewed back wall. Because of the size of the equipment inside the chamber, a custom wire-seal door to install large components was required. This aluminum wire-seal is a process commonly used on large vacuum chambers at Cornell, as rubber gaskets degrade over time due to the nuclear radiation inside the facility.“
The new chamber will be installed as a “hutch” tangent along the synchrotron beam line. It will hold instrumentation with a diamond that diffracts an incoming x-ray beam (Bragg’s Law). For example: X-rays used to study metallurgical stress (think of repeatedly bending a paperclip––this is what happens to airplane wings!)
