7th March 2012: QMC Instruments Ltd. has delivered the final shipment of 80 vacuum windows for "band 10" of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescopes in Chajnantor in the Chilean Andes. These windows are anti-reflection coated and have very challenging requirements for the in-band transmission. We received the following comment from ESO: "The performance of these windows are of a high standard, just like the previous batch, and the non-compliances are minor. My congratulations to you and other QMC staff involved!"
The staff at Thomas Keating Ltd. wish Graham Bell farewell after more than two years working with us as a project scientist in Billingshurst. He is leaving us and the UK to work in The Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii. We do hope he can continue his hobby as a glider pilot.
Dr Kevin Pike joined Thomas Keating Ltd. in February 2012. Previously, he has worked on the Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation (DNP) Project at the University of Warwick developing 6.7 and 14.1 T high-resolution DNP-enhanced Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and 3.4 T DNP-NMR at cryogenic temperatures with continuous-wave and pulsed microwaves. In addition to his interests in magnetic resonance and microwave hardware, he is also a keen hiker.
Through the good offices of Dr. Pat Foster, we have obtained a licence for v14 of HFSS, and have purchased aDell R5500 Rackmounted workstation and added 48 GB of RAM. We have started looking at the operation of a waveguide 240 GHz Single Sideband diplexer. It's operation can be seen in this video.