If the magician says “nothing”, look for cards or bunnies lurking behind the sweat of your arms and the stagnant air.
But if the manufacturer of a high-quality microchip says nothing is in the vacuum chamber, you really have to trust them. Hair, dust, and even contaminant molecules are likely enough to ruin delicate technology.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has validated a process it has been working on for some time to accurately measure extremely low gas pressures in confined spaces, and has provided industry and researchers with nothing new. provided a method.
Trying to expel all gas particles from a container quickly becomes a silly quest. A few stubborn stragglers will inevitably remain. Yet, if their collective pressure Below 0.000001 Pascal (about one trillionth of atmospheric pressure), using the Cold Atomic Vacuum Standard (CAVS), we can call it ultra-high vacuum.
Acquire this level of vacuum with accurate and reliable measurements Is difficultusually depends on the device you are using remaining gas particles become electron stepping stones, or to charge The ionized particles are then collected for counting.
But researchers have wondered if the limitations of experiments involving laser-cooled atoms could be turned into a convenient tool for detecting and counting atmospheric remnants remaining in vacuum chambers.
Cold, uncharged metal atoms held in magnetic traps often suffer A complication is that flying gas particles can fly out of the cage. Looking at it another way, measuring the loss of these atoms provides a fairly reliable indicator of the concentration of fast particles in the environment.
NIST researchers have shown that by connecting a magnetic trap loaded with about 1000 lithium or rubidium atoms to a vacuum chamber, they can consistently measure pressure within the ultra-high vacuum range, a new kind of CAVS sensor. It was created.
After spending the better part of the last seven years improving the device, the researchers just recently fitted new CAVS technology into a system that can steadily leak tens of billions of molecules into the chamber every second. .
By comparing the standardized volume of molecules entering the chamber with the measurements of the innovative CAVS sensor, the team showed that their method was more than just zero. It’s much simpler than what was created before.
It does not require calibration and is in fact a standard out-of-the-box vacuum reading.
“Indeed, the portable version is so simple that in the end we decided to automate it so that the operation requires little intervention.” To tell NIST physicist Dan Barker.
“In fact, most of the data from the portable CAVS for this study was acquired while we were comfortably asleep at home.”
It may not work like magic, but for high-end semiconductor producers and researchers who rely on vacuums to study just about anything, gravitational waves From quantum chaos to nothingness itself, new technologies could be just what we need to ensure nothingness.
This research AVS Quantum Science.