Category: Ra EDM
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The Great Bipolar High Voltage Power Supply Installation of 2017
What is a bipolar power supply and why do we need it? In the Ra EDM experiment, a high electric field flips sign on a roughly 1-minute cycle. The direction of the field is changed by reversing the sign, or polarity, of the voltage being applied across the “hot” cathode (field is…
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Stable & Repeatable Ramping of 40 kV/mm Electric Field
The weekly win for this week is the conditioning team’s efforts in the ramp simulations. In 2.5 days we put the Nb23 through approximately 16 hours of ramping simulations. On Friday we continuously ramp-conditioned the electrodes for 8.5 hours at 40 kV/mm = 400 kV/cm, which is our current record for…
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Farewell Andy & Courtney! (2017 MSU REU Poster Session)
Andy and Courtney have completed their REUs with the group this summer and presented their results at the REU poster session. Andy developed a machine vision system for characterizing the HV electrodes used for the Ra EDM experiment. This optical method is high resolution (10 microns), high precision (repeatable),…
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FRIB Day 1 Science Workshop: Fundamental Symmetries
Today I will present a talk with Jon Engel on FRIB Day 1 Science Opportunities for Fundamental Symmetries. This talk is part of a workshop that is a satellite meeting of the 2017 (US) Low Energy (Nuclear Physics) Community Meeting which is being hosted by Physics Division at Argonne National Lab. The…
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The Chunk Code: HV Stability During an EDM Simulation
This Weekly Win is a celebration of my high voltage ramp test analysis suite, AKA Chunk Code. Let me break this down into ‘chunks,’ if you will: Here is a plot of a high voltage ramp test the Spinlab RaEDM crew performed on 7-5-2017. The ramp test simulates the conditions that the electrodes will be subjected to…
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Stable & Repeatable Ramping of 170 kV/cm Electric Field
This week we hit a milestone by successfully running a ramping simulation to 170 kV/cm for ~ 1 hr. This is approximately 15% higher than the goal we set out to reach and more than double the electric field that we were able to achieve during the Ra EDM data…
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Laser Scanning of Yb Atomic Beam Fluorescence
The Single Atom Microscope team, led by Kristen and Roy, is taking large steps towards a proper calibration of Yb atom number density in solid Neon. Most recently, the atomic beam fluorescence measurements have incorporated laser frequency scanning. At a stable atomic oven temperature, these measurements are used to determine…
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Welcome REU Students Andy and Courtney!
Andy Sanchez (hat and backpack) is joining us from the University of Connecticut and will be working on Project 2. Courtney Nelson (blue dress) is joining us from Occidental College and will be working on Project 1. Project 1: Single Atom Microscope for Nuclear Astrophysics We are developing and commissioning…
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High Pressure Rinse of High Voltage Electrodes
This weekly win is about removing sub micron-sized particulates in the air we breathe from the Ra EDM electrodes, whose electrical performance can be degraded by the presence of these particulates, with a process called the high pressure rinse. The high pressure rinse is a critical step in decontaminating electrodes that we’ve adopted from accelerator science,…
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Fundamental Symmetries of the Early Universe and the Origin of Matter
This week I hosted Prof. Michael Ramsey-Musolf, Director of the Amherst Center for Fundamental Interactions, who was visiting from UMass.-Amherst to give the MSU P&A Colloquium on “Fundamental Symmetries of the Early Universe and the Origin of Matter.” Abstract: Explaining why the universe contains more matter than antimatter remains an open problem…
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