Focused Ion Beams

Hi Everyone,

Platinum deposition and cutting of my name into a
Silicon wafer (notice the scale bar is 3 um)

0 degree view of a crater that has been cut for cross
section view.

A quick update, I just finished training to use the Focused Ion Beam yesterday so I am now fully capable of micro machining!  You can do a lot of cool stuff like writing your name into a sample, marking a sample so you can find your targets again and more relevant to my thesis, cut craters in half and see the crater profile.

Platinum deposition helps to protect the sample you want to see a cross section of and helps to bring out the contours of craters.  In parallel with this work, I'm working with Yancey Sechrest, another grad student working for Tobin on a plasma turbulence problem, to create a program that can take a stereo pair (2 images of the same crater at different angles) and recreate a 3D model of the crater.  Hopefully I'll have a post soon with the results of that project

Shu

25 degree view of a crater that has been cut.  The white stuff
is a layer of platinum deposited to make the crater edge more
visible.

Hi Everyone,
I've been meaning to create a YouTube account for the lab for a while now and finally got around to it.  This is a time lapse I made using images captured from the dustcam while we were building the accelerator.  Whenever we get cool videos we'll be sure to post them to our account, TheCCLDAS.  Hope you guys like it!
Shu

Future of Space Flight Symposium

Hi everyone,
I apologize for the long hiatus, I've been working on my second comprehensive exam so I haven't had much time to blog.  Coincidentally, on the 29th of April, we at CCLDAS will be hosting a public symposium on the Future of Commercial Space Flight.  Check the flier above for details.  If you can't make it, you can still watch the symposium by going to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-future-of-commercial-space-flight.  Hope to see you all there!
Shu

The Pelletron Has Arrived!!!

Hey everyone,

The Pelletron arriving at the lab in the back of a
truck still to be unloaded

Sorry for not posting much lately, it's been really busy in the lab.  The Pelletron, the high voltage end of our accelerator, arrived yesterday so everyone's been really busy putting it together.  We're all super excited that its finally here after about a year and a half of waiting.  We can't wait to fire it up and shoot some dust.

The pelletron on its tracks next to the
gas tanks of SF6

We've already done a bunch of work on the pelletron and have the shell on its rails and the SF6 gas tanks in place.  We're hoping to be able to get the head stand in place by tomorrow so we can start aligning the pelletron to the rest of the beamline.  We took a bunch of pictures of the whole process of unloading it from the trucks and when we find time they'll all be on our flickr account.  Also make sure to check our webcam from time to time to see how the progress is going.  Both links can be found in the links section on the right side of the blog.  We'll keep taking pictures of the whole process so you'll get to see all the exciting work going on right now.
Shu

Exciting Things Going on at CCLDAS

Happy New Year!!

Even with most students out of town for winter break, work is feverishly going on as we await the arrival of the Pelletron (the business end of the dust accelerator) which will be arriving in early January. We have spent the last week finalizing the vacuum system by installing cryogenic pumps and other critical components (live progress can be seen here: http://dustcam.colorado.edu).

Meanwhile, I thought I would share some of the interesting pictures taken while operating the small accelerator (which is 1/150 the accelerating voltage of the big one). The first picture is our Star Trekesque warp drive which is used to accelerate our particles in and out of existence using principles of multi-dimensionality...

Okay, it is really just a look down one of our detectors which measures the velocity and charge of dust particles coming down the beamline... equally as cool as a warp drive! It uses sensitive electronics that can measure the image charge induced on the inner tube as the dust goes whizzing by at 100km/s.

These pictures show what happens when 20kV discharges in air. The images are from the back of the dust source where the dust is initially charged up and shoots through a pin-hole on the other side. The lightning is not supposed to happen, by the way.

When in operation on the big accelerator, these discharges won't occur since it will be surrounded by gas that prevents arcing. In the meantime we are working on ways of insulating the connectors.

AGU Fall Meeting 2010

To give you an idea of the scope, this is about a quarter of
the poster hall.  There's a total of about 2400 posters per day.

Hey everyone, most of the CCLDAS team is now at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting.  To give you an idea of the scope of this conference there were 14,000 attendees in 2007 (according to Wikipedia it's the largest annual scientific conference in the world).  I've been cruising around the conference checking out posters and going to talks and its been very exhausting with the sheer amount of information that you get bombarded with at this conference (not to mention that it happens every year during finals week so I'm always sleep deprived from final projects and studying).  There hasn't been a whole lot on the moon just yet at the conference, big day is tomorrow, there are talks all day on the moon, so I'll give an update on that after it happens.

Me in front of my poster with soda in hand ready to explain
how our accelerator works and what we're working on now.

On another note, I actually presented my poster today and there was a significant amount of interest in the dust accelerator.  Usually people just want to know what a dust accelerator is so I only get to talk about the left third or so of my poster but this time there were a bunch of people who were also excited at the other things we've been doing, like signal filtering to get better accuracies in measurements.  I was planning on standing by the poster for 2 hours at the conference and ended up talking for almost 4.5 hours straight!  I'll make sure to take more photos as the conference goes on and they'll all be up on the flickr account sometime this or next week.
Shu