Above is a picture of the vacuum system and cryostat in the astrochemistry lab that is fit with the manual liquid Helium transfer line. With this set-up it is possible to go as cold as 4 K, just four degrees above absolute zero! (thats almost - 270 C or -450 F) Drs. Salama and Halasinksi use it to take UV spectra of PAHs and PAH ions in solid Ne, and these are compared to astronomical data.

Above is a closer look at the window at the center of one of these vacuum systems. You are looking in the side of the vacuum system, through an outer window where a laser, IR, or UV light would shine. Inside the vacuum system is another window in a black frame (illuminated by blue light) and it is on this smaller innner window that the sample is prepared. Off to the right the thing that looks like its wrapped in gauze is a pyrex tube containing a sample of PAH. The wrap is heat tape, heating is needed to sublime the sample.

Above is a picture of one of our conventional systems that uses a closed cycle cryostat and goes to about 10 K. We have three such systems and these are used for infrared spectroscopy of ices and PAHs. In these pictures above you may have noticed the glass bulbs wrapped in yellow or black tape. These contain mixtures of gases that we depoist onto the CsI windows at low temperature, where they freeze solid. We mix these gases in a large glass line...

The glass line, above, is attached to a diffusion (vacuum) pump and has many openings so that many different compounds can be mixed together. We often mix simple molecules like water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia together in order to make samples that approximate the ices seen in comets and frozen on interstellar grains.