You can find out pretty easily with an optical spectrometer if you can get a view of an operating lamp, either directly or via an optical fiber. There are only about 5 possible fill gases and even a crude spectrometer will identify which ones are there. Something capable of resolving lines spaced roughly 2 to 5 nM appart should do it.
If you can measure the strength of the lines, you can compute the relative percentage of the fill gases. With better equipment, you should be able to measure the pressure in the bulb by broadening of the spectral lines, but that will require more sophisticated gear. I've not tried that. I check gases routinely with surplus HeNe and HeCd lasers. Neither work if the gas mix is off. Often a non-lasing unit can be brought back to useful output with some care. (BTW, I do NOT do it from 'first principles'. I compare the spectra of good and bad tubes) -John ============== > In message <602be75e324d4d31b5a2d7ab3ec79...@vectron.com>, "Bob Camp" > writes: >>Hi >> >>The exact "fill" in the lamp is one of those things the Efratom does not >>like to talk about. Best guess is that there is more than just Rb in >> there. > > It is no secret that buffer-gasses are used, but which they are is not > disclosed. Argon is a good guess. > > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 > p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 > FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by > incompetence. > > _______________________________________________ > 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. > > _______________________________________________ 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.
