Neutron Guide manufacturing is coming back to the US in a big way — thanks in part to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. This astronomical shift comes in the form of the Ground Test Accelerator (GTA)1: a 40-foot long, segmented cylindrical vacuum chamber that once housed a high-power particle beam accelerator designed to intercept missiles. “The unusually large size and detailed feedthrough designs of the chambers provide an ideal setting for a large-scale sputtering operation utilizing multiple metallic targets.” Phase III Physics Founder and CEO Christopher Haddock explains. “Exactly what is needed to make super mirror neutron guides.”
Before arriving at its new home in Downtown LA in April, the GTA spent 20 years in Indiana University’s Cyclotron Facility2. When Cyclotron director John Cameron first laid eyes on the accelerator at Los Alamos in 2003, it was sitting in a parking lot. “We said, ‘That looks like a nice accelerator. How about giving us that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, if you want it, you can have it.’” recounts Cameron. The accelerator’s inner workings were repurposed as founding equipment for the Cyclotron’s Low Energy Neutron Source project, which opened in 2005. With the accelerator technology removed, the chambers found themselves resting in a lot once again.
Haddock had a different plan; Backed by a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the Department of Energy and a team of dedicated scientists and engineers, he is refurbishing the chambers as “high vacuum environments required to perform Physical Vapor Deposition on large glass substrates.” Using chambers this large for PVD will allow Haddock and Phase III Physics to furnish neutron super mirror guides in large volume to neutron science facilities worldwide.
“These chambers represent the benefits that academic and private partnership may yield to the growth of US-based manufacturing, as neutron guides are currently only manufactured in high volume outside of the US.” Haddock and his team are currently in the early stages of development, but expect to produce American neutron guides at scale in the next few years.
1https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/gta.htm
2https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/2004/03/13/iu-gets-star-wars-equipme/48423703/