SFU is seeking two (2) high-performance vector network analyzers (VNAs) with identical technical specifications, capabilities, and accessories. These instruments will be housed in different locations (one at SFU Burnaby and the other at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland), and must function as fully independent test and measurement platforms. Research personnel will periodically move from one location to the other, and the same individuals will make use of both instruments. There is thus strong motivation for ensuring a high degree of compatibility and uniformity between the functionality and the user-interfaces of the two instruments.
Background: Both instruments will support current and anticipated future test and measurement needs of a long-standing program of scientific research that is focused on precision measurements of the properties of the hydrogen atom and its antimatter counterpart: antihydrogen. In practice, the instruments will be used to aid the development and characterization of passive and active RF and microwave devices, structures, and systems that are integrated with our atom-trapping apparatus and employed in fundamental physics experiments. Specifications for the instruments are ultimately set by demands imposed by spectroscopic features of the hydrogen and antihydrogen atoms, as well as by the electromagnetic behavior of electrons, positrons, antiprotons, and a variety of NMR-active nuclei in magnetic fields. A defining characteristic of the experiments we perform, and the instrumentation we necessarily employ to realize those experiments, is that low-noise and high-stability performance are critical. General information about our research, as well as a list of the key scientific publications that it has yielded over the last decade-and-a-half, can be found at https://alpha.web.cern.ch/
