PETER project moves forward

Alisa Leavesleyhas kindly agreed to join us at the start of August. Alisa received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry summa cum laud from James Madison University in 2013 and is anticipated to receive her doctoral degree in physical chemistry under the supervision of Songi Han in June 2018 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research has focused on developing a high field (7 T/200 GHz) dual dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) instrument and understanding the spin physics behind DNP – specifically the influence of radical heterogeneity and clustering on DNP. The PETER project provides a great opportunity for Alisa to expand and apply ...

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Low-X-polar compact antennas delivered to NSSC, Beijing

TK have designed and manufactured a set of five dual polarisation Lens/Corrugated horns antennas for China's National Space Science Centre in Beijing, operating from 10.5 GHz to 92 GHz     The antenna have very demanding X-polar specficiation (lower than -26dB), which require novel blooming of the lenses, visible above, and in the HFSS model below - the latter generated by our colleague Dr. Soe Min Tun, who performed the electromagnetic design     with typical predicted antenna patterns given below     Horns and all but one of the OMT's were made by electroforming     The S11 return loss  was measured to be in-spec at the UK's National Physical La...

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Horizon 2020 Peter Project kicks off

Thomas Keating is part of an international team which won 3M Euro of EU Horizon 2020 funding for a three year research program to develop a novel instrument  combining  High Frequency Electron Spin Resonance with Plasmon-based scanning probe microscopy. Other members are CIC NanoGUNE [Rainer Hillebrand]  in Spain, Stuttgart University [Joris van Slageren] in Germany,  and CEITEC [Tomáš Šikola and PetrNeugebauer] in Brno, Czech Republic.   Thomas Keating will be responsible for the THz probe and the Quasi-Optical part of the Instrument....  an inital sketch of the former is shown below:      The Kick Off meeting was held in Brno at the end of Janua...

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Sino-European Terahertz Technology Joint R&D Research Centre formed

Thomas Keating, and European colleagues from the Universities of Cardiff and Bern were delighted to welcome three distinguished spacecraft scientists from the Shanghai Spaceflight Institute of TT&C and Telecommunication,  for the formal opening of the   中欧太赫兹联合研发中心'Sino-European Terahertz Technology Joint R&D Research Centre    Richard Wylde and Prof. Yu shake hands after signing the agreement   Our visitors, Prof Yu, Zhenchao Xie & Jiang Lifei toured the facilities in Cardiff University on the Monday 8th January, and Thomas Keating on the Tuesday. Our visitors discuss their very ambitious plans for the future geostationary microwave radiometer instrument...

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TK designs the antenna for TROPICS, a NASA-Funded MIT CubeSat radiometer mission

TK has been engaged in the electromagnetic and mechanical design and manufacture of the antenna of TROPICS, a NASA mission using a set of 3U CubeSats with a radiometer payload to observe tropical storms from space.To quote the mission specification: "The Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission will provide rapid-refresh microwave measurements over the tropics that can be used to observe the thermodynamics of the troposphere and precipitation structure for storm systems at the mesoscale and synoptic scale over the entire storm lifecycle. TROPICS comprises a constellation of CubeSats in three low-Earth o...

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Zac Freeman to begin his toolmaking apprenticeship

Thomas Keating welcomes Zac Freeman to begin his toolmaking apprenticeship. First year training will cover the manufacture of personal equipment using traditional skills to our proven designs dating back to the early 1940's.     Setting a CNC milling machine       Working on a manual lathe