SIMION

I thought people might from time to time be interested in what I’m doing at school. Wen-Ping and I have been working hard on building a new “soft landing” instrument. Part of that is designing our “ion optics”. Basically we have to guide the ions that we make through certain paths in space (the red lines on the above diagram). We do so with voltages applied to specially shaped electrodes (the black parts above) that make electric fields (the green lines). We would like to get the most ions as possible through our instrument, so we do simulations of ion paths in a program called SIMION. Long story short, I had to learn a little computer programing to be able to draw the above shapes. Basically, I just wanted to put this up because the program gives pretty pictures and I thought someone somewhere might be slightly interested in it.