Some pictures of my lab, which I shared with my graduating students..
On top of the rack, there's a TimeElectronics direct current source, an hp34401A, another programmable direct current source for 10µA, 100µA and 1mA, a programmable AC current source (U/I converter) for 100µA ... 100mA. Below is a Krohn Hite 4400A ultra low distortion generator, NF3961B Lock-In amplifier, an hp3458A (11/1989), Keithley 199 with scanner card, a TTL timing-box for precise triggering of the 3458A, a PM6669 counter, the AFGU from Rohde und Schwarz, a Hameg scope, a sizzling hot 80386-20MHz AT-PC with '387 coprocessor, a spare KH 4024 oscillator, and an hp740B.
To the right, there's a double Dewar cryostat, about 1m high, silvered with window stripes.
The outer dewar usually contains the liquid nitrogen as a termal shield, and a huge copper coil for 100mT can be inserted & cooled. The copper coil, and the 20A/20V 4 quadrant PSU obviously was just used elsewhere.
The inner dewar contains the liquid He4. The sample stick is inserted into the Helium, and samples can be applied via the top vacuum cap. Attached to the side of the sample stick, there's a low noise audio differential amplifier.
This apparatus measured the magnetic susceptibility of High-Tc-Superconductors, various precision wound Hartshorn coils can be seen here:
The windings were done manually using a loupe spectacles. The inner pick-up copper wires were 40µm / 2 x 500wdg. and the outer field wires were 50..80µm / up to 2000 wdg., w/o any dislocation over 10..20 layers.
The 3458A was used as an ultra linear and fast 16..18bit A/D converter, and the FFT of the 195Hz signal could be calculated in real time.. some assembly code for collecting the data over GPIB was required at 20MHz.. On the screen, the ultra low distortion of 0.0009% or an SNR of -101dB of the hp3458A and the KH4400A is demonstrated.
Here's our nitrogen cow, a 200l metal dewar vessel.
The superconducting magnet inside the huge He4 dewar vessel generated fields up to 7T at 63A by the power supply / control unit from Oxford Instruments. The turbo molecular pump allowed lowering the He4 temperature from 4.2K to about 1.4K, and so to apply magnetic fields of up to 8T at 73A.
At these high fields, the monitor display got quite distorted, like the ac-signal from the samples. Latter was the subject of my thesis.
And here's the soldering and sample preparation table, obviously the students did not clean up: