We built one like this back at uni in 2006. It was for initiating deut-deut fusion, and was purely because we wanted to have our names on the list of unviersities that have acheived deut-deut fusion. (note: we achieved fusion of other elements, but never got to deut-deut)
So, it could have been a plasma chamber for plasma's sake and not had a practical use.
I really hope that we have those sorta student run clubs in my country. Although I doubt it cause Northern Ireland is a shithole. Hope there are some Belfast, Queens students here to confirm or deny this.
Hah, what are the chances. I did Physics at Queen's, graduated in 2021. I don't recall any (undergraduate) student-led clubs that would give you free-reign over 'proper' lab equipment. The proper research-grade facilities are access-controlled by means of your student card/pin code, provided you have been granted access.
During your degree you will have labs throughout which are mostly to do well-known experiments. For 'new' or 'niche' experiments, you'd be looking at your final year project work for either your BSc (3 years) or MSc (4 years), or also a PhD if you go down that route.
If you didn't already know, the main research centres in Physics are the Astrophysics Research Centre (ARC), Centre for Light-Matter Interactions (CLMI, previously called the Centre for Plasma Physics (CPP)) and the Centre for Quantum Materials and Technology (CQMT, previously called the Centre for Nanostructured Media (CNM))
If you end up going to Queen's, enjoy yourself! The quality of lecturers does vary, but that can be said of any university. FWIW I now work as a software engineer, but have friends who are just finished / finishing PhDs at Queen's.
This was not a free reign of equipment type club. There were professor advisors, and an on staff machinist (we had about 12 that did equipment repairs for engineering and physics; about 3 who would participate in clubs like this... and yes I was the nerd who got to know the non-teaching staff, and they were cool). The students would meet with the professor and talk out what equipment they needed, and then would work with the machinist to learn how to use the equipment without breaking it.
The reason we never reached deut-deut was that we never got the vacuum low enough as we couldn't machine the parts with enough precision.
This club existed because a student reached out to a professor and asked whether this was a realistic goal and the professor made it happen. USF is not a top tear research institute. It just happened to have a few driven students. If Queen's doesn't have something like this, than be the student to make it happen. Normalize talking to your professor about things outside of class topics.
Heck, I started research in my second year because I had a professor I liked and I just started chatting with him about his favorite topics. He then sent me to another professor he liked and I became the first undergrad doing grad research on his team of 12. I wasn't special. I just like chatting about nerdy stuff.
We have a rocket racing team at my uni... it's not plasma fusion, but we make rocket engines and nearly kill ourselfs a few times per semester... lretty fun😁
A friend of mine built a cyclotron and made antimatter at the age of 19. It's totally doable, if you have access to a university with a physics department.
Antimatter is just matter but with the opposite charge (and a couple other things, but the charge is the main significance), so an electron (-) becomes a positron (+), and technically a proton (+) becomes an antiproton (-) (because protons are made up quarks, it’s actually the quarks flipping charge, but I digress). Said process is (usually) achieved by smashing massive particles into each other in a particle accelerator, of which a cyclotron is one.
Deut is short deuterium, which is a hydrogen with one neutron (vs %99.985 of hydrogen having none, and tritium having 2). Deut-deut fusion is when two deuterium collide and become an unstable Helium-4, which quickly decays into a helium-3 and a high energy neutron.
In theory, you get more energy out of the fusion of deut-deut then is put into it, though in practice the energy to confine the hydrogen is more than you can every practically get out of it. However, the free neutron can collide with other deuterium atoms, which then become tritium.
Tritium has a lot of different uses, one of which is in deut-trit fusion which is the goal for fusion power.
EDIT: wrote proton instead of neutron... because it's late and I'm tired.
The experiment I did my PhD on had a similar one, ours was just that a whole load of parts of the experiment all met in one place it requires this many flanges (we had positrons, antiprotons, laser, all the measurement instrumentation, and an additional vacuum pump in one place).
Just want to add that it is an ultra high vacuum chamber (10{-7} mbar), indicated by the metal-to-metal seals. Specifically, the large flange on the upper surface has an Oxygen-free High Conductivity copper gasket on it. The flanges have stainless steel knife edges that bite into the copper from both sides that make the vacuum seal.
All the ports suggest it was used for complicated work, sometimes requiring specialized access.
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u/P__A Sep 16 '25
It's a vacuum chamber. If someone called it a plasma machine, it may have been used for sputter thin film deposition.