Le Vide… The Empty Realm, Much ado about nothing! The vacuum science world can be daunting to newcomers, even ones with shiny new Ph.D.s. Not a bit of the technology is covered in classwork, the practical or industrial units are a melange of non-SI, and often weird, units, and it is often difficult to tell what’s meant by ‘high vacuum’ or ‘high pressure’. Since the demise of vacuum tube technology, many of us have no grounding in thermionic emission, pumps, suitable gauges, gettering, and maddeningly, materials suitable for this world. I used to explain ion gauges to our customers by analogy to vacuum triodes; lately, nobody finds this useful!
One of the biggest concepts to choke over is that the greater part of a given apparatus is devoted to the production, maintenance, and gauging of vacuum. Often that doesn’t leave much money left over for the experiment or process. In the industrial world, this translates to avoidance of vacuum process whenever possible. Wet plating is one example. On environmental grounds, it should have vanished years ago. It’s still around because equivalent vacuum process is either expensive, low capacity, or just too arcane for most engineers. As that last remnant of vacuum electronics, the CRT, migrated offshore, the associated infrastructure and related technology just plain vanished from the US. All of this makes life more difficult for anyone making a cold start in vacuum.
This initial rant must mention the fact that it is becoming lonely in our world of custom and R&D instrumentation. Larger companies making systems and components have either simply shut down, been able to follow semiconductors out of the country, or found more lucrative things to do. We do not rejoice when we hear of a venerable competitor or supplier leaving. Although thin film (yeah, you can call it nano) technology underlies almost everything in the microelectronic, display, material science arenas, so much of the manufacturing side has migrated away that the research efforts have dwindled. Funding is appreciably lower than it once was, and our customers are increasingly asking for ‘the cheapest thing you can build’ rather than ‘the best thing’. We could not have imagined, thirty years ago, that small diffusion pumps would be around at all, let alone the preferred default for university systems!
So far, we’re not listing resources for newbies. The web is becoming the best place to start, and anyone with a connection to the (what used to be called ‘open’) literature, can efficiently get at what’s needed. We find, however, that our supply of older product manuals, catalogs, and our own engineering drawings provide help. Also recommended, especially for people working more or less without experienced support staff, is personal observation of existing equipment. We know, this is a little sad, like looking over a Roman structure to get a handle on engineering or weatherproof concrete, but in this field, what the ancients did in 1965 is likely to represent solid practice, adaptable today. Just because nobody sells an ion this, or a planetary that, or a gauge good to the -13Torr realm doesn’t mean it was never done. Find the bones!
