(I combined your two posts into one) > Mike
> The RV Jones papers were published in either the Review of > Scientific instruments or the Journal of Sceintific Instruments - > I forget which. > I'll look for my paper copies when I get back from shopping later > today. > Sydenham also wrote at least one paper on various capacitive > displacement sensors. > Physik Instrumente use capacitive displacement sensors with > nanometer sensitivity in their piezostages and piezoactuators. > Bruce > You could also look at Queensgate Instruments. > Integral capacitive sensors have been used in a feedback loop to > maintain the spacing and parallelism of a pair of Fabry-Perot > interferometer plates. > Bruce Hi Bruce, Thanks for the info. I looked at Physik Instrumente, and their performance is truly impressive. For example, the D-510.020 single-electrode capacitive sensor has a nominal range of 20 um, and a sensor active area of 11.2 mm^2: http://www.physikinstrumente.com/en/pdf/D510_Datasheet.pdf According to my calculations, that works out to a capacitance of about 4.95 pf. They show a resolution for this sensor of <0.001%, which is 20e-6 * 0.001 * 0.01 * 1e9 = 0.2 nm. The change in capacitance is 4.95 * 0.001 * 0.01 = 0.0000495pf, which is quite amazing. That is a very small change. If the nominal sensor voltage was 1 volt, this represents a change of 1 * 0.001 * 0.01 = 0.00001 Volt, or 10 uV, which is quite acceptable for good S/N. One problem might be long-term drift. The temperature coefficients and other errors are in the hundreds of ppm, whereas the tolerance in interferometry are down to 0.1 ppm. It is interesting to note they use Zygo ZMI-2000 and ZMI-1000 laser interferometers in their calibration labs, presumably for long-term accuracy: http://www.physikinstrumente.com/en/products/nanopositioning/test_calibration.php Also, they use flat plate capacitors in the sensors. I don't know how well this would work on a thin column of mercury surrounded by a glass dielectric. But this is new information to me, and I am quite impressed with the performance. Thank you for posting the information. Regards, Mike Monett _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.