After the first baking of the chamber, which I wrote about mid September, we observed some contamination with heavy molecules (usually greases and oils) and indeed found several dirty components inside the chamber. We therefore disassembled major parts of the setup for cleaning and are now testing the parts one by one. As a first step, today we reached the e-10mbar range that we are aiming for in the core of the chamber. Fun fact: at atmospheric pressure, molecules collide in average every 100nm with each other. At this pressure of 6e-10mbar it would take them 160km to hit another molecule! (if there were not the walls of the chamber)
