For my recent experiments I had to put together the little x-ray scattering vacuum chamber again. The last time we used it there didn’t seem to be anything special about its appearance. However, this time there seemed something quite peculiar as I put things together. It looked very similar to an elephant or an insect.

Here I’ve removed the long hose from the front “snout,” but the effect is still there. The two largest ports where the x-rays come in and go out (which above are glass, but replaced by Beryllium windows) make the eyes. It’s got ears and a nose, along with a couple of dangling arms/appendages. In truth it really was not intended to look like something else. It’s a surface scattering chamber complete with vacuum hardware and measurement pieces, an RF induction heating system, rotating sample stage feedthrough, fine-adjust gas flow leak-valves, burst-disk, and enough windows that I can see the sample positions during the experiment.

One of my friends took one look at it and said, “Ganesh!” The name stuck. So we have a vacuum chamber named after a Hindu deity. Stranger things have happened (I recall the himalayan pray flags that routinely went up during experiments at one beamline at the ALS), but it is a little odd to have my surface scattering experiment refereed to with the proper name of a god. “How is Ganesha today? Is Ganesha’s pressure ok? Is Ganesha’s thermocouple measuring the temperature accurately?”

It turns out that Ganesha the deity is often seen as a patron of science (among many other things). So perhaps the little vacuum chamber Ganesha is not without some obtuse justification beyond mere appearance. For better or worse, the name has stuck and I surely hope that it’s not seen as offensive.

One further thought... Most of our samples involve at least some (if not large) parts made from precious metals such as gold and platinum. So there have ben several occasions where such precious metals have been “offered” to Ganesha. Thankfully he’s always returned them to us intact.