Cryostat Control

Abstract

In order to measure the spectrum of radio emissions from galaxies and other deep space objects, a new superconducting spectrometer, working at very cold temperatures close to the absolute zero, is developed. An advanced cooling system called a cryostat is used to cool down the spectrometer. The cool down of the cryostat involves the control of multiple sensors and actuators connected to the cryostat to achieve a final temperature below 250 millikelvin. A software program is used for this purpose. As extra hardware components have been added to the cryostat, the existing program does no longer fulfill the requirements. For this reason a new software program, which can monitor temperatures of all components and start control processes, is developed. The developed program consists of a client server structure. The server handles the logic of the cryostat using several controllers. It can send data to a native client, which is the graphical user interface, or a REST API. The native client displays sensor readouts received from the server and allows full control of server, which means it can start the cool down process as well as manual control processes. The REST API allows the user to have full control over the server using a Python script to achieve measurements which cannot be done from the native client. The increased automation, improved control and ability to integrate with external Python scripts allow the user to focus on the essential parts of an experiment making the developed program an improvement over the previous program.