SCOUT: small chamber for optical UV tests

Abstract

-SCOUT is the acronym of the new facility developed within the XUVLab laboratory of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Florence. SCOUT stands for "Small Chamber for Optical UV Tests" and has been designed to perform practical and fast measurements for those experiments requiring an evacuated environment. SCOUT has been thought, designed and manufactured by paying a particular attention to its flexibility and adaptability. The functionality and the capabilities of SCOUT have been recently tested in a measurement campaign to characterize an innovative wire-grid polarizer optimized to work in transmission in the UV band.This paper provides a description of the overall manufactured system and its performance and shows the additional resources available at the XUVLab laboratory in Florence that make SCOUT exploitable by whatever compact (within 1 m) optical experiment that investigates the UV band of the spectrum.