Our customer, the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin, is currently developing an exciting new method to fully characterize materials and perhaps even influence their function in future.

For this purpose, modern synchrotron light sources must be able to determine the structure and dynamics of matter. This requires the generation of very short photon pulses. However, in conventional X-ray and UV storage rings, the natural pulse length is limited to about 10 ps.

Therefore in the “BESSY VSR” project the institute is currently developing a completely new procedure that is able to simultaneously provide short (1 ps) and long pulses up to (17 ps) at high current, so that users can select the pulses that best suit their experiments.

And we can also contribute to the research work. We produced a test chamber in order to test and qualify the 1.5 GHz couplers in the cold which is necessary for this method. This consists of a helium-cooled cryostat and a base RF test box with solid copper waveguide. The assembly meets the following special features:

• Very high purity requirements and requirements for UHV compatibility
• Integration of a helium system with very high insulation vacuum for the cold tests
• Realization of a particle-free, ionized nitrogen stream
• Brazing of 20 vacuum-tight copper-stainless steel connections in one single process step

The test assembly was successfully completed and delivered a few weeks ago. Now we are very excited about the test results. We keep our fingers crossed for the Helmholtz-Zentrum that the development will be successful.