JOHNS HOPKINS APL T E lectronic packaging has played a major role in the success of systems developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. This article briefly chronicles some selected and often unique examples of APL’s electronic packages over its 56-year history. The early APL electronic packages were needed for the famous VT fuze of World War II; in that case, four vacuum tubes and the ancilla...

The exceptional electronic and optical properties of high-quality organic crystals are well known and have been exploited in active electronic and optoelectronic devices such as field-effect transistors, photodetectors and optical modulators. This paper describes a room temperature method for in-plane growth of organic crystal needles from initially amorphous thin films of the molecular organic...

The newly developed nanoscale vacuum devices have basic functions similar to traditional tubes, but can be manufactured by existing silicon-based process lines achieve small size, light weight, and high integration, which makes them attractive, especially in the recent decade. historic development state-of-the-art of are reviewed. It is found that with lateral, vertical, gate-all-around structu...

An electrometer is an electrical instrument for measuring electric charge or electrical potential difference. There are many different types, ranging from historical hand-made mechanical instruments to high-precision electronic devices. Modern electrometers based on vacuum tube or solid state technology can be used to make voltage and charge measurements with very low leakage currents, down to ...

The physical nature of the currently observed dark energy in the universe is completely unclear, and many different theoretical models co-exist. Nevertheless, if dark energy is produced by vacuum fluctuations then there is a chance to probe some of its properties by simple laboratory tests based on Josephson junctions. These electronic devices can be used to perform ‘vacuum fluctuation spectros...

The concept of the vacuum in quantum field theory is a subtle one. Vacuum states have a rich and complex set of properties that produce distinctive, though usually exceedingly small, physical effects. Quantum vacuum noise is familiar in optical and electronic devices, but in this paper I wish to consider extending the discussion to systems in which gravitation, or large accelerations, are impor...