The new lab will be specially suited for building parts for ultra-sensitive detectors, such as those to carry out improved X-ray research, or for the South Pole Telescope to search for light from the early days of the universe.
‘This will be a unique facility, and a wonderful investment for the future of the laboratory,’ said Supratik Guha, who heads the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility adjacent to where the new space will be located. ‘It’s an excellent opportunity for us to push the boundaries of what’s possible.’
The cleanroom environment is needed to build instruments that can detect the tiniest amount of energy striking the surface.
‘Even a few stray specks of dust in the niobium can throw off the design for these detectors,’ said Marcel Demarteau, who heads the High Energy Physics Division at Argonne and will be a key user of the new lab.
The most sensitive instruments today are made using super-conductors, extremely sensitive materials that change properties dramatically when their temperature is raised even a tiny bit.
Scientists can build components that react to specific frequencies to detect the signature of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The new cleanroom should allow researchers to build even more sensitive detectors.
The same technology will also offer researchers a chance to get better close-ups of the atomic make-up of objects being studied at the Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne where scientists use X-rays to study everything from car fuel injectors to proteins that play roles in disease.
‘The type of detector we want to build, nobody makes commercially: so we have to build our own,’ said Thomas Cecil, an engineer with the Advanced Photon Source.
The new cleanroom will allow them to experiment with new kinds of transition edge sensors, which he said they hope could eventually improve the sensitivity by one or even two orders of magnitude compared with traditional silicon-based detectors.
Building such technology is an excruciatingly delicate process, in which they lay down multiple coatings just a few nanometers thick of superconducting materials and etch patterns into them. Then they repeat the process all over again, for up to 15 layers.
The detector itself is so precise that it is operated at temperatures colder than outer space to achieve maximum sensitivity. Other potential uses, Demarteau said, include quantum computing as well as homeland security: building detectors that can pick out the particular signature of a specific kind of radiation, to detect if terrorists are carrying a dirty bomb made out of, for example, cesium-137.
The build project broke ground in May and is expected to be completed in mid-2017.
