In the attempt to make superconducting wires, building a vacuum chamber is a pretty important step. The design we came up with consisted of two spool sections, one of which feeds the substrate and the other collects the, hopefully, superconducting tape. The middle cube is the region where PLD occurs as the tape passes across a heat bed and over the plasma plume of the YBCO material.

​

As I was constrained by whatever material was available to me, I was forced to create the design as compact as possible, hardly fitting the sizes of my stock. The material, aluminum, I ended using is also not ideal for vacuum chambers in raw conditions as it off-gasses more than steel. For this reason I ended up etching my parts after machining to decrease the scale of the issue.

​

The pictures below consist only one half of the chamber, built to test vacuum.

​

Ongoing project...