On 08/29/2010 03:55 PM, Attila Kinali wrote:
Moin,
I had a little bit too much time at hand this weekend and read a bit
about H masers. I was quite astonished to see how "simple" these devices
actually are. The electronics are basically a simple matter these days
(thanks to the abundance of GHz devices for cell phones and GPS receivers).
The only problem would be to build a high Q cavity, get a Teflon coated
quarz bulb of the right diameter, an apropriate atomic hydrogen beam source
and putting everything under high vacuum. Piece of cake ;-)
Thus i wondered whether anyone had ever build a H maser outside
national labs and and specialized companies. Looking at the time-nuts
archives, quite a few people asked about the feasibilty of such
an endeavor. A few times i read of people who actually attempted to build
one, but never was there any website or any other resource with their
results meantioned. Neither did big-g return any results when searching
for these homebrew H masers.
Does anyone know whether any of those people collected their results
somewhere? And if, where i could find them?
The physical package is definitely where most of the effort goes in. A
complicating aspect is the self-tuning stuff for which several
strategies may be chosen.
You need to balance the rate of the atoms, as both too few and too many
kills the oscillation.
The size of the glass-bulb is not a fixed thing, during research and
development different sizes glass-bulbs is used to establish the
wall-shift aspects in order to adjust for it, which is needed in order
to make absolute measurements on the "free" atom resonance or compensate
into that regard.
As for reference, there is about one set of books and papers from a
handful of journals and a bunch of patents which needs to the read in
order to build up the knowledge-base for attempting something like it.
It's a complicated field and several traps to fall into on the way. It
is a fairly sizeable project to attempt.
Cheers,
Magnus
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