38 research outputs found

    Study of the discharge gas trapping during thin film growth

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    Discharge gas trapping in thin films produced by sputtering is known to be due to high energy neutrals bouncing back from the cathode. Qualitatively, the phenomenon is enhanced by raising the discharge voltage and is strongly dependent on the atomic masses of the discharge gas and of the cathode material. In addition to these known effects it is shown that, for a given gas, the trapped amount decreases with increasing the melting temperature of the deposited material. The results obtained both by sample melting and laser ablation are presented and discussed

    Sub-THz Waveguide Spectroscopy of Coating Materials for Particle Accelerators

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    The electromagnetic characterisation of different materials for the inner wall coating of beam pipes is a long-standing problem in accelerator physics, regardless the purpose they are used for, since their presence may affect in an unpredictable way the beam coupling impedance and therefore the machine performance. Moreover, in particle accelerators and storage rings of new generation very short bunches might be required, extending far in frequency the exploration of the beam spectrum and rendering therefore more and more important to assess the coating material response up to hundreds of GHz. This paper describes a time domain method based on THz waveguide spectroscopy to infer the coating properties at very high frequencies. The technique has been tested on Non Evaporable Getter thick films deposited by DC magnetron sputtering on copper plates

    Active sites for outer-sphere, inner-sphere, and complex multistage electrochemical reactions at polycrystalline boron-doped diamond electrodes (pBDD) revealed with scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM)

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    The local rate of heterogeneous electron transfer (HET) at polycrystalline boron-doped diamond (pBDD) electrodes has been visualized at high spatial resolution for various aqueous electrochemical reactions, using scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM), which is a technique that uses a mobile pipet-based electrochemical cell as an imaging probe. As exemplar systems, three important classes of electrode reactions have been investigated: outer-sphere (one-electron oxidation of ferrocenylmethyltrimethylammonium (FcTMA+)), inner-sphere (one-electron oxidation of Fe2+), and complex processes with coupled electron transfer and chemical reactions (oxidation of serotonin). In all cases, the pattern of reactivity is similar: the entire pBDD surface is electroactive, but there are variations in activity between different crystal facets which correlate directly with differences in the local dopant level, as visualized qualitatively by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM). No evidence was found for enhanced activity at grain boundaries for any of the reactions. The case of serotonin oxidation is particularly interesting, as this process is known to lead to deterioration of the electrodes, because of blocking by reaction products, and therefore cannot be studied with conventional scanning electrochemical probe microscopy (SEPM) techniques. Yet, we have found this system nonproblematic to study, because the meniscus of the scanning pipet is only in contact with the surface investigated for a brief time and any blocking product is left behind as the pipet moves to a new location. Thus, SECCM opens up the possibility of investigating and visualizing much more complex heterogeneous electrode reactions than possible presently with other SEPM techniques
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