Electron beam heater

For the past two weeks I've been painstakingly rebuilding an electron beam heater. It's used to heat up materials that you can't pass current through. It works by dumping hot electrons onto the object. This all sounds very fancy but in reality it's just been fiddly. Like threading four needles at once in the dark. With an oncoming wind. Now it's fixed and you can see our material glowing hot in the chamber. We put the samples in the chamber so that we can pump all the air away and keep our samples clean. This particular chamber houses a scanning tunneling microscope, used to produce a topographic map of the electronic envelope surrounding the surface atoms - it takes a 'picture' of the atoms if you like. See my earlier post for an example of what it does.