• Question: inside a labory is it clean?

    Asked by odnoklassniki to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 15 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      looking around our accelerator halls….. no. there’s cabling and bit of wires and equipment all over the place. my office is even worse, piles of paper and bits of old computers.

      we do have clean rooms though, where you have to wear white overalls and cloth shoes. they’re certified to have less than 100,000 particles of size greater than 0,1 microns in a cubic metre of air. so they’re pretty clean! We use them to prepare vacuum chambers and radio-frequency accelerating cavities – these things must be really, really clean otherwise they contaminate your multi-million pound accelerator and render it useless.

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Inside most of the labspace no – especially the control room where we spend hours looking after the experiment and eat dinner breakfast and lunch there. When constructing our paticles detectors though we do use clean room lab spaces to reduce contamination from dust and radioactive materials.

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      In my experience, labs are very very clean when they need to be (the cleanest places on earth, in fact), like Peter describes. But other times they’re a bit more ‘lived in’ (unless the safety inspectors have just been round…).

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Diamond is quite new, so most of its still quite shiny, but as time goes on it gets more rugged. We do have 2 specific clean labs. One is the Optics laboratory where they need to keep all the equipment dust free, and the other is one of the biological laboratories where they need to keep things clean to stop contamination of the samples.

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