To measure high energy nuclear particles, the detectors and other components need to be spotless—ultrasonic cleaning is a big help.

If you’re running an experimental nuclear and particle astrophysics laboratory, you’ve got to build some pretty sensitive detectors.  Noise in the detectors can create spurious measurements that can make any meaningful measurement impossible.  To make the detector signal clean, the detector and its environment needs to be made clean—literally. Steps in the process include leaching plastic parts, etching copper, and cleaning stainless steel parts.  To make each of those processes effective, an ultrasonic cleaner is used at various steps of the process.  For example, to clean etched copper parts, a sulfuric acid bath can be entirely immersed in an ultrasonic cleaner.