Richard Wylde was privileged to be asked by ESO to the ALMA opening ceremony in the Atacama desert inNorthern Chile in early March 2013.   ALMA has nearly all of its 66 Telescopes now connected to form a very high resolution interferometric telescope. (When you scale the 16 Km ALMA baseline using its operation wavelengths, you get a higherangular resolution than, say, the Hubble telescope operating in the visable). The trip also took him to theHigh Site where the antennas are placed - a little above 5000 Metres, where the air pressure is not muchmore than half that at sea level. Richard Wylde at the high site Tasked with looking star and galaxy formation at high red shifts in the early ...

The first set of CMB results for the Planck mission were released on the 21st March 2013. They showed an amazing fit to the standard Lambda/Cold Dark Matter model, at least at at high multipoles - there's more of a puzzle with very broad angles (Low multipole moment). Along with defining the main cosmological parmeters (How much Baryonic & Dark matter, and how much Dark Energy makes up our flat Universe) to very high precsion, and limiting the allowable Inflationary models, the power spectrum make a strong case that there are only three types of Neutrinos.  The technical broadcast from a number of Planck scientists is well worth the 90 minutes connected to your computer screen. With...

  10th August 2012: In response to customer feedback, we have reduced the weight of our most popular helium bath cryostat - the TK1813 - by over 25%. A TK1813 now weighs just 14.5 kg empty, and 16 kg when full. Despite now being much easier to handle, other aspects of the design, including all safety features and a helium hold time of up to a week, remain the same.  

There is quote a nice article from our CADCAM  supplier - EdgeCAM - which can be found here - on our activities.    

Continuing a tradition of steady and continuous investment, two precision machine toolshave arrive at TK: The first is an ultra precision 8400 CNC moore Jig Grinder, rebuilt for usin the US by 2SQ Industrial supply Inc. It is controlled by a Fagor CNC controller, operatingon a 5 axis basis (X,Y,Z and U & C on the grinding head). Moore 8400   The Z axis feed has been modified to give full Z-axis control, turning the Jig Grinder into an ultra-precise sub-micron resolution milling machine.   Huron K2X10 The second machine is a Huron K2X10 1000mm by 800mm table-movement high speed millingmachine with a Heidenhain ITNC530 control. Constructed as a gantry machine, and with heat shrink balance...

The Financial Times in London ran a set of articles on the Queen's Award on Saturday, 21st April 2012and the snippet about TK is here: