So you wanna see atomic particles with your own eyes huh? Here's how to do it easily!
Just build a nuclear cloud chamber...for around $7.
Cloud chambers let you see paths left by radioactive particles as they pass through a supersaturation of alcohol vapor. Vapor trails are formed when the radiation ionizes the alcohol mist super-cooled and formed by dry ice under the aquarium while the top of the aquarium drizzles the propanol (very pure rubbing alcohol you must never touch, or Everclear grain alcohol would probably work, as would methyl alcohol like Heet fuel additive). I went with a $7 bottle of 99.9% pure rubbing alcohol. Caution: the 70% stuff at drugstores won't work.
Alpha particles, and beta and gamma rays leave different looking trails in the mist; as do muons, positrons, cosmic rays, electron collisions;--basically ions. X-rays, bremsstrahlung (braking) radiation and annihilation radiation arising from positrons interacting with electrons basically behave like gamma rays. Some trails are long and thin, some are short and fat, some branch out like lightening: each path can tell you the exact type of particle that just whizzed by! Yes, you can actually see the tracks they rip through the mist. You can even use a strong magnet and "bend" the path of some particles.
What I used: 10 gallon aquarium; metal roof flashing; stiff wire/coat hangers; styrofoam block; socks; wire to use as tie-wraps; 99.9% rubbing alcholol; DRY ICE and some radioisotope AM-241 from an ionic chamber type smoke detector ($5 at any store). AM-241 is Americium (pronounced Amer-eh-SHE-um). You'll see the Am-241 in the video, it's just a flat silver disk that is INSANELY RADIOACTIVE, yet it mostly shoots out
Don't get confused AM has a number of 95 on the Periodic Table, but this is one of its isotopes (241). Am-241 is so radioactive that all the "harmless" alpha particles is shoots out are so plentiful it actually damages the crystal structure of the element itself! This is like the damage that radioactive particles can do to your DNA to cause cancer. In addition to tons of alpha particles it also emits some gamma particles as well. My Geiger counter can't see alpha particles--just beta, gamma and x-rays and even so it reads around 300 clicks per minute!
MANY PEOPLE ONLINE SAY THAT AM-241 FROM A SMOKE DETECTOR ONLY PUTS OUT A FEW GAMMA PARTICLES AND THE REST IS SAFE ALPHA. THEY OBVIOUSLY DON'T OWN GEIGER COUNTERS AND CANNOT ANSWER WHEN YOU ASK THEM TO QUANTIFY THE GAMMA RADIATION.
So do your own homework, buy a $99 Geiger counter (I use a GQ GMC-300e Plus) and don't believe everything on the internet, it can get you killed. At 300cpm what is dangerous gamma particles in this piece of AM-241 is only slightly worse than two of my old glow-in-the-dark wristwatches from the 1930s. Still, the danger is there.
BUILDING THE BEAST
Here's how I did it. Cut a recess in a foam block to hold the dry ice.
Make a wire frame inside an aquarium to hold the socks that we'll douse with 99.9% rubbing alcohol. The long pieces will go near the glass bottom. The aquarium will be upside down with the socks at the top when the unit is working.
Put the socks on and tie them with thin wire. Rubber bands will melt from the alcohol and break from the dry ice. Just use wire bread bag wraps if that's all you can find.
The aquarium's glass bottom is now it's glass top.
I fit the the aquarium on the glass block so it was air-tight and put a piece of THIN metal roof flashing between the dry ice and the inside of the cloud chamber. It looks black here because I had it covered, but it didn't work so I uncovered it. In the video it's bright shiny metal.
I put the dry ice in the hollowed out recess in the foam block. I doused the socks with alcohol. Put the AM-241 on the metal plate. I put the metal plate on the dry ice and the aquarium over everything.
Next I added a light bulb on top of the glass carefully since these 99.9% alcohol vapors are highly inflammable. The light bulb was to add WARMTH to the top of the aquarium while the bottom was super-cooled by the dry ice. This creates the fog of alcohol vapors at the bottom for the particles to leave trails through.
In the video (which gets better halfway through because I re-position the light) you'll see a half-sphere dome of fog over the AM-241 disk and a flower-like cascade of alpha particle trails shooting off the disk. The unit only worked for about 10 minutes after 2 hours of trying. Oddly, even though everyone says it needs to be airtight--the unit only started working once I gave up and started to dismantle it. Once some warmer air hit the inside the fog formed and I started seeing trails!
This could mean that the whole aquarium was too cold. At one point I put a bucket of hot water on top of the aquarium to increase the temperature differential, but it didn't seem to help. I filmed it for a few seconds, and then spent a few minutes silently watching with a smile on my face.
Almost everything I scavenged for free, including the smoke detector's AM-241. The 99.9% rubbing alcohol was $7 and all gone when I was done. I got the dry ice from the Melvindale Public Library where I work: we had an open house and children's bookmark drawing award ceremony and we had dry ice left over from the ice cream we served. I knew that we'd have dry ice left over, so I ordered the alcohol and built the nuclear cloud chamber a couple weeks before the event. So I guess this is a $7 cloud chamber.
And that's how you can "see" atomic particles. It's a lot more fun than those golf-ball diagrams in your textbooks and tinker toy balls and connectors: like Coca-Cola this is the REAL THING; and it won't give you cavities...but it might give you radiation poisoning...
