UT Austin researchers test Low temperature DAC set-up

front to back (Marshall, Lin & Guthrie) in SNAP cave

 Afu Lin, Junjie Wu and Luke Marshall from UT Austin along with Malcolm Guthrie (GL) tested the first iteration of the low-temperature membrane set-up on SNAP.

Much of the beamtime was spent optimising the windows and collimation on the CCR tank but, eventually, count rates were achieved that were only 10% higher than without the tank. With further design work, it's likely that this can be improved.

Marshall and Wu with inner CCR attachment on cold head

The cell was found to cool rapidly to 53K and was stable. We were then able to pressurise the sample, but found this caused the temperature to increase to ~70K.

With input from Lin, clear design improvements to the cooling connections were conceived and sub 30K operation is likely in the future