Materials for cutting-edge experiments in astronomy and particle physics

Progress in fields such as astronomy and fundamental physics can require increasingly complex instrumentation operating at millikelvin temperatures. Such instruments often have demands on materials and components which have not been seen previously, particularly for space based instrumentation. The large scale of these projects and tight timescales forces as conservative design as possible. However, building these instruments with conventional techniques and materials is often impractical and sometimes impossible. It is therefore common for the design stage of such instruments to include test and measurement programmes. This adds risk to the development schedule, and such programmes also suffer from the problem that they are tightly focused on the exact needs of one particular instrument. We are setting up a laboratory to measure material properties and develop cryogenic components for general use in future large millikelvin instruments. By decoupling these measurements from a particular instrument programme, we have the freedom to make more speculative measurements, such as measuring new polymers whose cryogenic properties are completely unknown. We describe our set-up and the results of initial work.