Progress Report Nick Shipman Thursday 17 February 2011

Progress Report Nick Shipman - Thursday, 17 February 2011 1

Things I should have been doing and did • • • Fixed electron bombardment heater! Some Reading Read of a fair bit of new (for me) breakdown distribution data from some graphs. This week I spent nearly all of my useful time in the lab with Rocio, trying to fix the new electron bombardment heater. It took a very long time… I counted 398 from SLAC

Things I should have been doing but didn’t/Things I should be doing soon • Capacitance simulations/measurements I still need to look into the meshing for the capacitance simulations, Hugo has offered to help and once I have looked at it properly myself I will accept his offer! I am also going to make some more capacitance measurements with my Planck set up using a much larger anode and cathode until my results match my simulations. • Loaded/Unloaded breakdown distributions Now I have some more data, I will generate some more results. This is quite a poorly understood subject at the moment and I have a few ideas I would like to try but I need some time to really think about them first. Things other people shouldn’t have been doing but did • Despite a concerted effort to persuade Ian it wasn’t necessary, he very kindly wrote some MATLAB code for me which imports data from Maxwell.

Things I might should be doing in the future Walter went to Valencia last week to discuss a collaboration between CERN and the VSC (Val Space Consortium) and ESA (European Space Agency). Apparently they might like some Ph. D. students to go over and help out with some experiments. Some of what they are doing seems very interesting and relevant to what I would like to be doing. Namely, the measurement and analysis of electromagnetic radiation generated by multipactor discharge in microwave components. One of the things I would need to learn about is “mode matching” and Walter has told me there is a lot of expertise on this in our group. Finally… I shouldn’t be doing anything next week! I’m planning to take Monday-Wednesday off next week as my girlfriend is visiting!