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Exhibit Hall #4 : Other Selections
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| name of piece: |
Channel electron multiplier |
| artist: |
Mark Gehrke, Garrett Piech, Scott Schappe |
| date of acquisition: |
1998 |
| description: |
The death of this CEM has yielded two insights: (1) Don't place the
input of a CEM directly in front of a rubidium atom beam. (2) Don't try sending high voltage
pulses to a CEM that was designed for DC operation.
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| name of piece: |
Deacceleration Stage |
| artist: |
John Boffard, Mark Lagus |
| date of acquisition: |
1990 |
| description: |
In an effort to get more He+ beam current for the fast-beam
metastable source experiment, we tried to extract the beam at high energies and then
deaccelerate it. The results were, at best, only a marginal increase in current.
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| name of piece: |
'Quik Cool' System |
| artist: |
John Boffard, Mark Lagus |
| date of acquisition: |
1991 |
| description: |
The fast-beam metastable atom experiment, uses a cesium vapor target
produced by heating cesium up to about 250°C. Located inside vacuum chamber, it takes over five hours for the
cesium oven to cool down to the melting point of cesium. In case of a disaster we wanted to
cool the oven off quickly, so we installed the 'Quik Cool' system. It consisted of two water
cooled copper blocks mounted to the oven. The results: cooling time was reduced from five
hours to three hours (please provide three hour notice of all impending disasters).
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| name of piece: |
180° Mirror Mounts |
| artist: |
John Boffard, John Fons |
| date of acquisition: |
1994, 1997 |
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| description: |
Mounts to hold an off-axis parabolic mirror. The mirror must be
rotated between facing a vacuum chamber and a standard lamp. The first design used a nifty
spring and step to allow rotation of exactly 180°. The piece on the left used this design,
but was designed incorrectly (mirror rotated up-down instead of left-right). The second piece
used the same rotation mechanism, but was found to be too unsteady. A third attempt (not pictured
because it worked) used dowel pins to position the mirror. Years later, a larger mirror was
purchased, requiring a new adapter. The third piece is an adapter with the dowel pins located
0.645" apart when they should be 0.626" apart.
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| name of piece: |
100 Amp Fuse |
| artist: |
unknown |
| date of acquisition: |
6:45PM CST, March 9, 1992 |
| description: |
So one day while we were working, the lights went out in B618,
well sort of. The overhead lights went out, but a desk lamp still worked, at least in
some of the outlets in the room. And depending on which outlet you plugged the lamp into,
you could sometimes make the wall clock work. It was strange. We had blown the 100A fuse on
the neutral AC line. Our lab was fed with three phase power, the various outlets were fed
from different pairs of the three phases. Any unbalance among the three phases is carried in
the AC neutral line. Somehow, we had managed to plug almost everything in the lab into outlets
fed from the same two phases, throwing things seriously out of balance.
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| name of piece: |
Mr Hankey Laser Diode Mount |
| artist: |
Len Keeler |
| date of acquisition: |
1999 |
| description: |
Mr. Hankey was a replacement laser diode mount. When we switched from 9 mm diodes to
5.6 mm diodes we built a new diode housing, rather than just modifying the old one (which worked). The Mr. Hankey
mount, however, was flakey and the atom trap was 'crappy'. Suspecting microwave coupling problems with the Mr. Hankey
laser mount, Mr. Hankey was dispatched to the Hall of Failure. He responded, "Howdy Ho!".
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| name of piece: |
KBr Beamsplitter |
| artist: |
Jeff Chilton |
| date of acquisition: |
March 10, 1999 8:10 AM (GMT-6) |
| description: |
After the 'Incident in B636', our $3669.90 KBr beamsplitter for the infrared FTS was
converted into a number of smaller component parts. The parts include a $257.25 KBr window, some $0.10 springs, and a really spiffy addition to the Hall of Failure.
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