A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, the beams of which are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures, radar targets, or other phenomena. A CRT on a television set is commonly called a picture tube. CRTs have also been used as memory devices, in which case the screen is not intended to be visible to an observer.
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.
Sir Joseph John Thomson was a British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered.
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a grid. An image is formed from the interaction of the electrons with the sample as the beam is transmitted through the specimen. The image is then magnified and focused onto an imaging device, such as a fluorescent screen, a layer of photographic film, or a sensor such as a scintillator attached to a charge-coupled device.
A linear particle accelerator is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear beamline. The principles for such machines were proposed by Gustav Ising in 1924, while the first machine that worked was constructed by Rolf Widerøe in 1928 at the RWTH Aachen University. Linacs have many applications: they generate X-rays and high energy electrons for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy, serve as particle injectors for higher-energy accelerators, and are used directly to achieve the highest kinetic energy for light particles for particle physics.
An electron gun is an electrical component in some vacuum tubes that produces a narrow, collimated electron beam that has a precise kinetic energy. The largest use is in cathode ray tubes (CRTs), used in nearly all television sets, computer displays and oscilloscopes that are not flat-panel displays. They are also used in field emission displays (FEDs), which are essentially flat-panel displays made out of rows of extremely small cathode ray tubes. They are also used in microwave linear beam vacuum tubes such as klystrons, inductive output tubes, travelling wave tubes, and gyrotrons, as well as in scientific instruments such as electron microscopes and particle accelerators. Electron guns may be classified by the type of electric field generation, by emission mechanism, by focusing, or by the number of electrodes.
Quadrupole magnets, abbreviated as Q-magnets, consist of groups of four magnets laid out so that in the planar multipole expansion of the field, the dipole terms cancel and where the lowest significant terms in the field equations are quadrupole. Quadrupole magnets are useful as they create a magnetic field whose magnitude grows rapidly with the radial distance from its longitudinal axis. This is used in particle beam focusing.
Electrostatic levitation is the process of using an electric field to levitate a charged object and counteract the effects of gravity. It was used, for instance, in Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment and is used to suspend the gyroscopes in Gravity Probe B during launch.
Electron-beam welding (EBW) is a fusion welding process in which a beam of high-velocity electrons is applied to two materials to be joined. The workpieces melt and flow together as the kinetic energy of the electrons is transformed into heat upon impact. EBW is often performed under vacuum conditions to prevent dissipation of the electron beam.
An electrostatic lens is a device that assists in the transport of charged particles. For instance, it can guide electrons emitted from a sample to an electron analyzer, analogous to the way an optical lens assists in the transport of light in an optical instrument. Systems of electrostatic lenses can be designed in the same way as optical lenses, so electrostatic lenses easily magnify or converge the electron trajectories. An electrostatic lens can also be used to focus an ion beam, for example to make a microbeam for irradiating individual cells.
A Crookes tube is an early experimental electrical discharge tube, with partial vacuum, invented by English physicist William Crookes and others around 1869-1875, in which cathode rays, streams of electrons, were discovered.
A teltron tube (named for Teltron Inc., which is now owned by 3B Scientific Ltd.) is a type of cathode ray tube used to demonstrate the properties of electrons. There were several different types made by Teltron including a diode, a triode, a Maltese Cross tube, a simple deflection tube with a fluorescent screen, and one which could be used to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of an electron. The latter two contained an electron gun with deflecting plates. The beams can be bent by applying voltages to various electrodes in the tube or by holding a magnet close by. The electron beams are visible as fine bluish lines. This is accomplished by filling the tube with low pressure helium (He) or Hydrogen (H2) gas. A few of the electrons in the beam collide with the helium atoms, causing them to fluoresce and emit light.
Electron optics is a mathematical framework for the calculation of electron trajectories along electromagnetic fields. The term optics is used because magnetic and electrostatic lenses act upon a charged particle beam similarly to optical lenses upon a light beam.
An electron spectrometer is a device used to perform different forms of electron spectroscopy and electron microscopy. This requires analyzing the energy of an incoming beam of electrons. Most electron spectrometers use a hemispherical electron energy analyzer in which the beam of electrons is bent with electric or magnetic fields. Higher energy electrons will be bent less by the beam, this produces a spatially distributed range of energies.
An electrostatic analyzer or ESA is an instrument used in ion optics that employs an electric field to allow the passage of only those ions or electrons that have a given specific energy. It usually also focuses these particles into a smaller area. ESA’s are typically used as components of space instrumentation, to limit the scanning (sensing) energy range and, thereby also, the range of particles targeted for detection and scientific measurement. The closest analogue in photon optics is a filter.
A sextupole magnet consist of six magnetic poles set out in an arrangement of alternating north and south poles arranged around an axis. They are used in particle accelerators for the control of chromatic aberrations and for damping the head tail instability. Two sets of sextupole magnets are used in transmission electron miscoscopes to correct for spherical aberration.
An electrostatic particle accelerator is one of the two main types of particle accelerators, in which charged particles are accelerated to a high energy by passing through a static high voltage potential. This contrasts with the other category of particle accelerator, oscillating field particle accelerators, in which the particles are accelerated by passing successively through multiple voltage drops created by oscillating voltages on electrodes. Owing to their simpler design, historically electrostatic types were the first particle accelerators. The two main types are the Van de Graaf generator invented by Robert Van de Graaff in 1929, and the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator invented by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932. The maximum particle energy produced by electrostatic accelerators is limited by the accelerating voltage on the machine, which is limited by insulation breakdown to a few megavolts. Oscillating accelerators do not have this limitation, so they can achieve higher particle energies than electrostatic machines.
This is a subdivision of the Oscilloscope article, discussing the various types and models of oscilloscopes in greater detail.
Beam deflection tubes, sometimes known as sheet beam tubes, are vacuum tubes with an electron gun, a beam intensity control grid, a screen grid, sometimes a suppressor grid, and two electrostatic deflection electrodes on opposite sides of the electron beam, that can direct the rectangular beam to either of two anodes in the same plane. They can be used as two-quadrant, single-balanced mixers or (de)modulators with very linear qualities, their mode of operation similar to one-half of a Gilbert Cell, by applying an unbalanced signal f1 to the control grid and a balanced signal f2 to the deflection electrodes, then extracting the balanced mixing products f1 − f2 and f1 + f2 from the two anodes. Similar to a pentagrid converter, the cathode and the first two grids can be made into an oscillator. Two beam deflection tubes can be combined to form a double-balanced mixer.
A deflection yoke is a kind of magnetic lens, used in cathode ray tubes to scan the electron beam both vertically and horizontally over the whole screen.
