Invited Paper VT-WeM3
It's All Because of the Vacuum...
Wednesday, November 9, 2016, 8:40 am, Room 101D
A number of key scientific demonstrations from the 18th century to the present were enabled by the essential task of obtaining a low enough level of vacuum. This talk explores a number of well-known events in the history of science and technology that depended on achieving a remarkable level of high vacuum for the era contemporary to the demonstration. We start with Franklin’s lyceum experiments where he applied static voltages across glass cylinders where pressures were lowered below ambient conditions with crude air pumps. This work presaged subsequent work on gas discharges and modern accelerator cavities. A century later, J. J. Thomson was the first to make an electron beam by lowering vacuum levels sufficiently to prevent ionized residual gas ions from shielding the negative particle beam. Fast-forward to the early 1960’s where G.K. O’Neill invented the now standard configuration for contemporary particle physics experiments- the high intensity storage ring. This configuration demanded and achieved true ultrahigh vacuum levels on an industrial scale. The story concludes with this year’s remarkable detection of gravity waves using LIGO - the kilometer-scale laser interferometers that required extreme high vacuum levels for all residual gas components.