So You Wanna See Atomic Particles With Your Own Eyes Huh, Part 3: Unleashing the fury of the alpha particle spark detector!
When working with high voltage make sure to start by lighting a candle to St. Artemy of Verkola! -Michael Logusz
Unleash the fury!!! My new toy: an alpha particle spark detector with an 8000 volt negatively charged ungrounded plate and extremely thin wires that are grounded. It's like a bug zapper for radioactive particles!
So far I've used: Geiger Counters, nuclear cloud chambers and a spinthariscope/radioscope to detect, and visually see the paths various radioactive particles (alpha, beta, gamma and x-rays) leave in supercooled alcohol vapor and I've seen the flashes of light their impacts cause when smashing into a thin coating of zinc sulfide.
When an alpha particle passes in-between the wire and the plate of this alpha particle detector it ionizes the air in between: ZAP! The disk I'm holding with tweezers is 0.7 microcuries of the radioisotope Americium-241.
Every ZAP causes an avalanche: electrons start smashing there way into the electromagnetic field while ionizing the air gap between the plate and wire creating a plasma. The dielectric breakdown strength is exceeded by the electrical field's power. This rips a conductive path in the air. It's what causes lightening bolts to get all spikey, inside a sealed Geiger Counter tube is called the gas multiplication effect, but the result is the same: ZAP!
I bought this simple, but amazing device from Scientifics Direct. The first arrived with a blown out power supply. They rushed me out a replacement that works fantastically as you can tell from the videos.
In the diagram above to the upper right is an idea: layer many of these in a stack and that would give you the speed and direction of the particle!
My visceral "need to see" is met with these devices, unlike understanding through theory via mathematical formulae-which can have its own, equally powerful eureka moments. I still remember seeing Saturn for the first time at 2:22am with my telescope set up in the middle of a freezing Michigan road. Simple seeing: nowadays astronomers use telescopes that measure rather than simply look and see. In contrast, my activities are utterly primitive, but they're really fun!
This video shows a larger 0.9 microcurie source that is better insulated with protective plating: it will degrade slower, but has slightly fewer particles zinging off of it. Still plenty of fun! And all it took was 8000 volts of electricity that was negative (below the voltage of the ground point, in this case the wires).
High Voltage / Highly Weird
High voltage electricity (even without ionizing radiation) is fascinating. So are the electromagnetic fields that high voltages create. Many household devices feature transformers.
A transformer is basically two diffetent coils of wire that don't touch. The first coil gets powered by the electricity from the wall outlet plug. The electricity flowing through the coil creates an electromagnetic field. This field radiates outward and creates electricity in the nearby (but not touching) secondary coil.
Weird! But it gets weirder: if the second coil has more loops of wire it will receive/create more electricity than was pumped into the first coil from the wall outlet! That's a step up transformer. Less coils mean lower power is magically captured: a step-down transformer.
If both coils have the same amount of loops, the same amount of electricity jumps to the second coil as was pumped into the first coil. This of called an isolating transformer: all it does is isolated the wall outlet power from the device since at no time do the coils ever physically touch! Since all transformers isolated, only the ones that don't step up or down are called isolating transformers.
Here's a transformer I just got that will step up 120 volt wall outlet electricity to 7,500 volts. At the bottom left is a tiny first (primary) coil. It is not attached in any way to the rest of the transformer. The field of creates bleeds over onto the huge coil to the right: stepping up the voltage.
I was given this transformer for free yesterday, along with a bunch of other high voltage toys. I would have made an alpha spark detector with it, but since I already have one maybe this will end up as a Tesla Coil or Jacob's Ladder or who knows what.
Whatever I make will probably be a visceral seeing device, as opposed to a subtle sensing one. First I look, then I go back and visit the theory. My first love is seeing but I always (eventually) get to the theory.
Forget seeing particles, I'm working on a new string theory: I think this string might taste good! Meow.
