[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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