Major fucking bitch-just fitted a new fuse into the power supply I have on effectively indefinite loan off my old man. No luck, turned the power on and not a whimper from the damned thing. He's going to take a look inside, see if he can fix it, but, well, its generally not that optimistic.
On the plus side, means when I get my own (although I'll of course return the favour and let him use mine once I buy another) I'll buy myself one with a variable output, but one that can supply some hefty peak currents, to the point where I'm wondering just how much juice a domestic supply can output as peak current draw. Mainly because I want to try some experiments that will need both a regular vacuum pump just to start the main one, or ones, a turbomolecular pump and possibly mercury diffusion pump after that, for pumping down a *very* high vacuum chamber, suitable for my trying some experiments trying to build a penning trap, for use in a magneto-optical ion trap/charged particle trap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penning_trapI'd like to have a go at building one of these, partly for experimenting and seeing what I can do with it, useful or otherwise, and partly for an analytical technique in chemistry-stroke-physics called fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry.
Basic premise is that a sample is ionized and accelerated into a penning trap, a kind of magnetic/radio frequency trap, in a vacuum chamber, and accelerated to a cyclotron resonance frequency, then accelerated further to a higher cyclotron resonance frequency, in other words, closer to the outside of the trap than to the center, and pass by a pair of electrodes in their orbit, which induces a momentary charge on the electrodes, creating a signal, as a superposition of sine waves, that is the crude output, and the exact waveform is dependant on the mass and charge of the ionic species(s) and a fourier transform is performed via a computer on the output which, as I understand it, gives the mass spectrum directly. Perhaps pairing it with time-of-flight from an ion source down a small linac (linear accelerator).
Of course, BUYING a mass spec of any kind is WAY more than I can afford. Thats pretty top of the line equipment, but there is nothing to say I can't build one for much less than I could (if I had the money) buy one off the shelf, so to speak. And would be damn fun to try. The traps can also be used for experiments with ultra-low energy states in atomic physics, using whats known as a magneto-optical trap, the optical bit coming from the fact that paired sets of lasers are used to confine the atoms, and lower their energy, capable of doing all kinds of neat stuff, such as creating bose-einstein condensates, such as in helium-4 where it loses all viscosity and friction, and if liquid 4He is placed in a container, it will creep up the sides of anything its put in and try to escape. Would be neat to try confining it in a optical/magnetic bottle like that and see what the hell it can be poked and prodded into doing.
First things first though, I'm going to need power supply, probably several of them
