Why Pressure Scales Cause So Much Confusion

Extract

Pressure scales can be extremely confusing to new operators. This is not surprising. To my mind, there are three primary areas of confusion.

Firstly, the pressure of gas inside an instrument changes over many orders of magnitude during pumpdown. The change is about 9 orders of magnitude for a traditional Scanning Electron Microscope and about 13 orders of magnitude for an ultra-high vacuum instrument such as a Scanning Auger Microprobe.

To give an idea about the scale of change involved in vacuum, consider that the change in going from ambient pressure to that inside a typical ultra high vacuum system is like comparing one meter with the mean radius of the planet Pluto's orbit. The fact is that we don't often get to play with things on that scale. As a consequence, many of us have to keep reminding ourselves that 1 X 10^-3 is one thousand times the value of 1 X 10^-6 - not twice the value.