Last week was a busy week, with Prof. Claire Vallance (and two colleagues) visiting to help with technology transfer for our Direct Ion Detection project, based on their previous work in this area. Some scintillator coatings, using the laser dye Exalite 389, were successfully prepared. The video shows this (very basic!) coating technique in action, and the image above shows one of the results, under the microscope. This coating will be combined with a Hamamatsu MPPC chip to form a complete ion detection system.

Vacuum sublimation in progress from femtolab.ca on Vimeo.

For further details, see:
A new detector for mass spectrometry: Direct detection of low energy ions using a multi-pixel photon counter
Edward S. Wilman, Sara H. Gardiner, Andrei Nomerotski, Renato Turchetta, Mark Brouard and Claire Vallance
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 013304 (2012).

Improved direct detection of low-energy ions using a multipixel photon counter coupled with a novel scintillator
Winter, King, Brouard & Vallance
International Journal of Mass Spectrometry, 397–398, 27–31 (2016)