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NEW DOCTOR IN PLASMA PHYSICS FOR ACCELERATOR DEPARTMENT

Muneer Sakildien from the Accelerator Department
recently defended his doctoral thesis entitled
“Characteristic Ká emission of Electron Cyclotron
Resonance Ion Source Plasmas” (ECRIS) at the
University of Jyväskylä. The thesis was co-
s u p e r v i s e d b y

Dr Pete Jones from the Subatomic Physics
Department. In terms of the university regulations
the defence is conducted by an expert in the field
and for Muneer's defence Dr Laurent Maunoury
from GANIL acted as the Opponent. Muneer is also
scheduled to visit GANIL later in this year to
present a colloquium on his PhD work as well as
discuss possible future collaboration on plasma
diagnostics from an ECRIS.

INSTRUMENTATION AND IT DEPARTMENT
ACQUIRES 3D PRINTER

A 3D printer from Markforged was recently procured by the INIT
department. This printer has high standard resolution and printing
speeds. It was acquired in its basic version with possible upgrades in
the future to allow for reinforcement material, carbon fibre printing,
and ultimately metal printing via the sintering process.
In its current version, parts within overall dimensions of 320 mm x
132 mm x 154 are printed in ONYX, a plastic material with superior
mechanical properties as compared to traditional PLA or ABS
materials. Communicate your printing needs to the INIT department
at instrumentationsupport@tlabs.ac.za .

TAMS DEPARTMENT FIRST PRODUCTION RUN AT THE NEW
TANDETRON FACILITY

The paper “The demise of the largest and oldest African baobabs”, by
Sulphur material is notoriously known to evaporate rapidly under the effect
Adrian Patrut, Stephan Woodborne, Roxana T Patrut, Laszlo
of ion beam irradiation, and for this reason sulphur targets are seldom used.
Rakosy, Daniel A Lowy, Grant Hall, Karl F von Reden, published in
The first production run at the new Tandetron facility was performed to test
Nature Plants, Volume 4, 423-426 (2018) was ranked #66/100
a new target making approach. The element is encapsulated in between
globally for its news value, and #21 when
extremely thin Mylar material and beam is constantly swiveled onto the
compared with papers of the same age. Coverage of the
pocket. The method proves to be effective with as little as 1mg of initial
Baobab climate change project was shown on CNN in December
material. This is particularly interesting when dealing with the expensive
2018 (https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/31/africa/baobab-trees-are-
36 S isotope.
dying-climate-change-intl/index.html.
( h t t p s : / / w w w . a l t m e t r i c . c o m / t o p 1 0 0 / 2 0 1 8 / )

iThemba LABS News
21 January 2019 Volume 3 Issue1