Remember when WWII arrived, crystals were of poor quality and not in great supply. The quartz crystal materials were all imported from South America and contained impurities.

They had the nasty habit of abruptly changing frequency or drifting. They also stopped oscillating when humidity got high. Imagine yourself in the jungle calling for support during WWII and the transmitter goes dead due to the crystal. Something had to be done.

This was solved quickly by growing "pure" crystals and developing the manufacturing process to do so.

We've come a long way baby.

Regards
Brian

On 6/30/2013 23:04, Bob Camp wrote:
Hi

On Jun 30, 2013, at 2:44 PM, Magnus Danielson <mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org> 
wrote:

Hi Bob,

On 06/30/2013 06:30 PM, Bob Camp wrote:
Hi

Ummm…. errrr…. not so much.

Ions in the lattice are part of the crystal structure. When you "move" them by 
sweeping you put stress on the quartz. That stress may take a *long* time to relax out. 
Since there is now a defect in the lattice (where the ion was) the stress may be relieved 
by an ion moving back to that location.


Quartz is swept to reduce it's radiation sensitivity. That's a big deal if you 
are going to put the oscillator in outer space or if you expect to need to use 
it when unexpected bright lights appear in the sky. Neither one is likely to be 
of interest in a typical basement lab. The levels involved also would drive you 
to radiation harden the rest of the oscillator circuit, not just the crystal.

There have been a series of papers on various influences on crystals. If the 
blank is an SC, it can be tuned by an applied DC voltage. Many precision parts 
have a DC short across the resonator for this reason. In that case, you would 
not see anything to drive an ion anyway.

NIST have been using this effect for precision phase modulations.

I don't agree that swept crystal has not been talked about. It is mentioned all 
over the precision crystal papers, it's there if you look for it. It however 
does not make much sense to discuss it for us, since we usually deal with 
complete oscillators and only rarely work with single crystals, and in that 
case very rarely of the quality where swept crystals occurs.

There is definitely more to it than sweeping the crystal.

Thanks Bob for the extra insight. The way sweeping works, won't a number of additional 
runs help to re-melt the crystal and help "ironing out" the dislocations in the 
crystal?

That's not the way it's done. One pass under bias, pull the ions to the edges. 
Cut off the edges. If you re-melt and re-grow the crystal you get a whole new 
batch of ions from the growing process.

Bob


Cheers,
Magnus
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.


-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.2242 / Virus Database: 3204/5951 - Release Date: 06/30/13







-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.2242 / Virus Database: 3204/5951 - Release Date: 06/30/13


_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

Reply via email to