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The Faraday cup electrometer is the simplest form of an electrical aerosol instrument used in aerosol studies. It consists of an electrometer and a filter inside a Faraday cage. Charged particles collected by the filter generate an electric current which is measured by the electrometer.
According to Gauss' law, the charge collected on the Faraday cup is the induced charge, that means that the filter does not need to be a conductor. It is typically used to measure particles of unipolar charge, which are particles with a net charge concentration that equals the charge concentration of positively or negatively charged particles.
With an aerosol electrometer the transportation of charge by electrical charged aerosol particles can be measured as electric current.
In a metal housing (Faraday cup) a particle filter is mounted on an insulator. A Faraday cup is a detector that measures the current in a beam of charged (aerosol) particles. Faraday cups are used e.g. in mass spectrometers being an alternative to secondary electron multipliers. The advantage of the Faraday cup is its robustness and the possibility to measure the ion or electron stream absolutely. Furthermore the sensitiveness is constant by time and not mass-dependent. The simplest form is the following: A Faraday detector consists of a metal cup, that is placed in the path of the particle beam. The aerosol has to pass the filter inside the cup. The filter has to be isolated. It is connected to the electrometer circuit which measures the current.
An electric current is the rate of flow of electric charge past a point or region. An electric current is said to exist when there is a net flow of electric charge through a region. In electric circuits this charge is often carried by electrons moving through a wire. It can also be carried by ions in an electrolyte, or by both ions and electrons such as in an ionized gas (plasma).
Cathode rays are streams of electrons observed in discharge tubes. If an evacuated glass tube is equipped with two electrodes and a voltage is applied, glass behind the positive electrode is observed to glow, due to electrons emitted from the cathode. They were first observed in 1869 by German physicist Julius Plücker and Johann Wilhelm Hittorf, and were named in 1876 by Eugen Goldstein Kathodenstrahlen, or cathode rays. In 1897, British physicist J. J. Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of a previously unknown negatively charged particle, which was later named the electron. Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) use a focused beam of electrons deflected by electric or magnetic fields to render an image on a screen.
Electric charge is the physical property of matter that causes it to experience a force when placed in an electromagnetic field. There are two types of electric charge: positive and negative. Like charges repel each other and unlike charges attract each other. An object with an absence of net charge is referred to as neutral. Early knowledge of how charged substances interact is now called classical electrodynamics, and is still accurate for problems that do not require consideration of quantum effects.
An electrometer is an electrical instrument for measuring electric charge or electrical potential difference. There are many different types, ranging from historical handmade mechanical instruments to high-precision electronic devices. Modern electrometers based on vacuum tube or solid-state technology can be used to make voltage and charge measurements with very low leakage currents, down to 1 femtoampere. A simpler but related instrument, the electroscope, works on similar principles but only indicates the relative magnitudes of voltages or charges.
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. The results are typically presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-to-charge ratio. Mass spectrometry is used in many different fields and is applied to pure samples as well as complex mixtures.
Time of flight (ToF) is the measurement of the time taken by an object, particle or wave to travel a distance through a medium. This information can then be used to establish a time standard, as a way to measure velocity or path length, or as a way to learn about the particle or medium's properties. The traveling object may be detected directly or indirectly.
Plasma diagnostics are a pool of methods, instruments, and experimental techniques used to measure properties of a plasma, such as plasma components' density, distribution function over energy (temperature), their spatial profiles and dynamics, which enable to derive plasma parameters.
In physics, a charge carrier is a particle or quasiparticle that is free to move, carrying an electric charge, especially the particles that carry electric charges in electrical conductors. Examples are electrons, ions and holes. In a conducting medium, an electric field can exert force on these free particles, causing a net motion of the particles through the medium; this is what constitutes an electric current. In conducting media, particles serve to carry charge:
An electroscope is an early scientific instrument used to detect the presence of electric charge on a body. It detects charge by the movement of a test object due to the Coulomb electrostatic force on it. The amount of charge on an object is proportional to its voltage. The accumulation of enough charge to detect with an electroscope requires hundreds or thousands of volts, so electroscopes are used with high voltage sources such as static electricity and electrostatic machines. An electroscope can only give a rough indication of the quantity of charge; an instrument that measures electric charge quantitatively is called an electrometer.
The ionization chamber is the simplest of all gas-filled radiation detectors, and is widely used for the detection and measurement of certain types of ionizing radiation; X-rays, gamma rays, and beta particles. Conventionally, the term "ionization chamber" is used exclusively to describe those detectors which collect all the charges created by direct ionization within the gas through the application of an electric field. It only uses the discrete charges created by each interaction between the incident radiation and the gas, and does not involve the gas multiplication mechanisms used by other radiation instruments, such as the Geiger counter or the proportional counter.
A Faraday cup is a metal (conductive) cup designed to catch charged particles in vacuum. The resulting current can be measured and used to determine the number of ions or electrons hitting the cup. The Faraday cup was named after Michael Faraday who first theorized ions around 1830.
An electrostatic precipitator (ESP) is a filtration device that removes fine particles, like dust and smoke, from a flowing gas using the force of an induced electrostatic charge minimally impeding the flow of gases through the unit.
The Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) is a reversed field pinch (RFP) physics experiment with applications to both fusion energy research and astrophysical plasmas located at University of Wisconsin-Madison. RFPs are significantly different from tokamaks in that they tend to have a higher power density and better confinement characteristics for a given average magnetic field. RFPs also tend to be dominated by non-ideal phenomena and turbulent effects. MST is one of the sites in the Center for Magnetic Self Organization (CMSO).
The hot-filament ionization gauge, sometimes called a hot-filament gauge or hot-cathode gauge, is the most widely used low-pressure (vacuum) measuring device for the region from 10−3 to 10−10 Torr. It is a triode, with the filament being the cathode.
An ion is an atom or molecule that has a net electrical charge. Since the charge of the electron is equal and opposite to that of the proton, the net charge of an ion is non-zero due to its total number of electrons being unequal to its total number of protons. A cation is a positively charged ion, with fewer electrons than protons, while an anion is negatively charged, with more electrons than protons. Because of their opposite electric charges, cations and anions attract each other and readily form ionic compounds.
A measuring instrument is a device for measuring a physical quantity. In the physical sciences, quality assurance, and engineering, measurement is the activity of obtaining and comparing physical quantities of real-world objects and events. Established standard objects and events are used as units, and the process of measurement gives a number relating the item under study and the referenced unit of measurement. Measuring instruments, and formal test methods which define the instrument's use, are the means by which these relations of numbers are obtained. All measuring instruments are subject to varying degrees of instrument error and measurement uncertainty. These instruments may range from simple objects such as rulers and stopwatches to electron microscopes and particle accelerators. Virtual instrumentation is widely used in the development of modern measuring instruments.
Faraday's ice pail experiment is a simple electrostatics experiment performed in 1843 by British scientist Michael Faraday that demonstrates the effect of electrostatic induction on a conducting container. For a container, Faraday used a metal pail made to hold ice, which gave the experiment its name. The experiment shows that an electric charge enclosed inside a conducting shell induces an equal charge on the shell, and that in an electrically conducting body, the charge resides entirely on the surface. It also demonstrates the principles behind electromagnetic shielding such as employed in the Faraday cage. The ice pail experiment was the first precise quantitative experiment on electrostatic charge. It is still used today in lecture demonstrations and physics laboratory courses to teach the principles of electrostatics.
This glossary of physics is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to physics, its sub-disciplines, and related fields, including mechanics, materials science, nuclear physics, particle physics, and thermodynamics.
A Coulombmeter is a tool for measuring the electrostatic charge of a material. A Coulombmeter is used in combination with a Faraday cup or a metal probe for taking charge measures of a material.
The Charged Aerosol Detector (CAD) is a detector used in conjunction with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and ultra high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) to measure the amount of chemicals in a sample by creating charged aerosol particles which are detected using an electrometer. It is commonly used for the analysis of compounds that cannot be detected using traditional UV/Vis approaches due to their lack of a chromophore. The CAD can measure all non-volatile and many semi-volatile analytes including, but not limited to, antibiotics, excipients, ions, lipids, natural products, biofuels, sugars and surfactants. The CAD, like other aerosol detectors, falls under the category of destructive general-purpose detectors.