[time-nuts] How quartz crystals are (were) fabricated
Bob Camp
lists at rtty.us
Thu Aug 1 12:05:58 EDT 2013
Hi
The only known impact of radiation on quartz crystals is to move impurities
around in the lattice. That's going to be a bad thing. There have been many
papers on this. If you want to dig into them, digging into a good index of
the FCS proceedings is a good starting point.
The crystals shown in the movie were going into pressure holders. The whole
stress / strain / frequency thing was well in the future in 1943.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On
Behalf Of Charles P. Steinmetz
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 9:53 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] How quartz crystals are (were) fabricated
Bob wrote:
>The X-Ray process does nothing good to the crystal. It's impact is
>highly dependent on how "dirty" the crystal is.
Bob,
Do you have authoritative references for this proposition? If not,
can you identify what data and what inferences it is based on?
I could imagine the X-ray process relieving stress in the crystal
(perhaps to advantage), or disrupting the crystal structure (likely
detrimental). I'm interested to know if anyone has researched this
in a systematic way and, if so, what they found. (My intuition
favors the disruption hypothesis over stress relief, but I'm much
more interested in research and data than in intuition or
speculation.) Data on other forms of radiation would also be
interesting, if research has been done. (We already know that heat
can be beneficial, at least in certain circumstances, so I'm not so
interested in that at the moment.)
Of course, when the X-ray technique was developed most crystals were
not housed in evacuated holders, so atmospheric and environmental
factors were larger contributors (at least to aging) than they are
today. That could have obscured researchers' ability to discriminate
the effects of the X-ray treatment in contemporaneous testing.
Best regards,
Charles
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