TIME IN A BOTTLE . . .

MAGNETIC FIELDS REDUCED BY FACTOR OF 1000

When the duration of an event is measured in nanoseconds, and each event requires the coordinated efforts of a team of dozens focusing and firing a bank of 60 precision lasers simultaneously at a target one millimeter in diameter, you want to capture and review the reaction.

Your everyday 35mm camera just won't do.

When the event being captured is the fusing of Hydrogen into Helium, essentially re-creating the 100 million degree Celsius temperature of the Sun, the stakes go up and the allowance for "error" goes down.

At the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester in New York, as in hundreds of industrial, educational and governmental laboratories around the world, the tool of choice to measure extremely fast light pulses is an optical Streak Camera. Or, to be precise, "A Self-Calibrating, Multichannel Streak Camera for Inertial Confinement Fusion Applications".¹

More than five years ago Mr. Robert Boni began work on a project at the University of Rochester to upgrade the performance of their particular approach to Streak Cameras, called the ROSS (Rochester Optical Streak System), essentially improving the performance by a factor of ten to achieve less than 1% measurement error. Ten percent accuracy was the "norm".

As requirements tightened, he realized he must shield the Camera against even the earth's magnetic field. He states the use of "Camera" in the descriptor is an artifact dating back to the Manhattan Project of the 1940s.

Fortunately for him, the U of R had a long-standing relationship with Magnetic Shield Corporation. Specifications and requirements were exchanged, and designs tendered for both cylindrical and rectangular shields. Cylindrical shields for the heart of the camera, the Streak Tube, an electron tube that measures the actual time of the event. Rectangular shields were used to harden the electronics of the instrument against all the possible sources of noise.

In This Issue:

Omega Fusion Project

Gaussmeter/Lab Kit

Effective, proven solutions to electromagnetic interference in electric wiring applications.