eli5 Why is a perfect vacuum so hard to create?

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My university has a sputtering machine which is this crazy expensive piece of equipment that has to have a really strong vacuum pump and wacky copper seals and if it loses power for even a minute it has to spend 16 hours pumping it’s vacuum back down.

I know people talk about how a perfect vacuum is like near impossible, but why? We can pressurize things really easily, like air soft co2 canisters or compressed air, which is way above 1 atmosphere in pressure, so why is going below 1 atmosphere so hard? I feel dumb asking this as a senior mechanical engineering student but like I have no clue lol.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Hydrogen – just based on the physics of turbo pumps and diffusion pumps alone, hydrogen is near impossible to actually remove from space entirely. One of the ways UHV chambers which analyze hydrogen are made is by using either titanium coated insides or making the whole vessel out of titanium which picks up hydrogen quite easily so you can get down to super low levels of hydrogen

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