Charles Brooks, who is known for his shots of rare and valuable musical instruments, also shared radio waves produced in the vacuum chamber that had been converted into sound to hear the passing electrons.
Brooks took this unique opportunity to photograph a cryogenic undulator which will soon be installed in the main storage ring and used as a light source for the Nanoprobe Beamline. Accelerator physicist Eugene Tan, who conceived of the concept, along with engineers and technicians, assisted the photographer.
Once installed, it will be placed under vacuum, cooled to -123 degrees celcius, and may not be opened again until the Synchrotron reaches the end of its service life.
To capture this unseen landscape, Brooks used a laparoscope, usually reserved for medical procedures, adapted to a Lumix camera. Each photograph is a combination of hundreds of individual frames, blended using focus-stacking and panorama techniques to bring out every fine detail from the foreground to infinity.
The undulator is housed inside a large vacuum chamber and the passing electrons excite electromagnetic resonances of the chamber at very high frequencies, similar to a drum.
