Nowadays, due to the complexity of UHV systems used in a variety of applications (i.e. Particle Accelerators, Surface Science, Portable Systems, Cold Atomic Traps, Electron Microscopes) the space available for mounting UHV pumps is getting smaller: the presence of design constraints, service equipments, conductance, magnets and various instrumentation poses challenges to traditional UHV pump designs, which are called to deliver more pumping performances in a smaller space.

A radically new approach is here presented, which can mitigate this issue. In this approach Non Evaporable Getter (NEG) pump based on sintered getter disks and ion pumping technology are properly combined and integrated in one single pumping device, called NEXTorr®. In this pump, the NEG element based on sintered St172® getter alloy acts as the main UHV pumping element, leaving to a small sputter ion pump the ancillary task of removing noble gases and methane, not pumped by the NEG element. This design allows achieving large pumping speed in a very small package, up to several tens of times smaller and lighter than conventional ion pumps nominally equivalent.

The presentation will cover first some theoretical and practical aspects of NEXTorr and also of the CapaciTorr® pump based on St172 sintered getter disks, particularly efficient in pumping Hydrogen, which is the main residual gas species at UHV levels.

Then the NEXTorr and CapaciTorr pumps concept will be introduced, and its usage in a variety of applications will be discussed.