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Build Your Own Cyclotron
mindpixel writes "Physics Today is running a story about Tim Koeth's 12 inch cyclotron. Here's a quote that says it all: 'I was sitting in Tom Devlin's modern physics lecture. He described the principle of the cyclotron. He said it required a lot of RF power. I was--and am--a ham radio operator, so RF was no problem. It needed a big magnet; I knew I could find one of those. How tough could a vacuum system and chamber be?'"
I've seen Battlestar Galactica. First you build one, then it tries to kill you!
Building a cyclotron on a Friday nite is at the top of my list, NOT!!!!
an Orgasmotron?
/.'ers especially could make use of that technology.
Any Dennis Miller Referentially-Challenged types please see http://imdb.com/title/tt0070707/.
I see "12 inch" and "vacuum" in the same story.
/. posting spam now?
Is
"We expect there is an azimuthal distortion," says Koeth. "We think we might have to further adjust the shape of the pole pieces."
yeah, just what _I_ was thinking.
*rolls eyes*
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I fucking hate ugly magnets because I still find them almost as attractive as the cute ones.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I too was a mild-mannered scientist, until I was hit with an accidental dose of Gamma Rays and turned in The Incredible Hulk ... so Tim should be careful.
I have only one question.... can I cook my eggs in the morning with it ?
n. A circular particle accelerator in which charged subatomic particles generated at a central source are accelerated spirally outward in a plane perpendicular to a fixed magnetic field by an alternating electric field. A cyclotron is capable of generating particle energies between a few million and several tens of millions of electron volts.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Already done.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
I made a cloud chamber in junior high (and I graduated from high school in 1972, so do the math.)
A little dry ice, some alcohol, black paper, a strong light, a petri dish (I think it was), and a bit of the stuff from the hand of a watch.
It actually worked; I could see an occasional trail of condensation, but the thrill was not that it worked but that I built it. I would not have been thrilled one bit less if it hadn't of worked at all.
The recipe is:
1. A bunch of RF (is that the metric or English "bunch"?).
2. A large magnet (mine sez Acme, is that okay?)
3. A vacuum system... Well I know of a woman who can suck chrome, so I guess that would be good enough.
4. A chamber.... Okay yah got me stumped here sparky. Is a Altoids tin good enough?
Hmmmm.... Or how about my ol' microwave oven? (2/4 requirements)...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
No fair, I thought there would be instructions!
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oh DON'T tell me all the moderators are experts on cyclotrons. Sheesh.
You are such a pervert!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Scientific American used to run article on how to build things for physics. Seems like prior to persuing chemistry and electrical engineering my brothers and I built Van Der Graff generators, cloud chambers, and lots more from those pages. They had an old design for a particle accelerator as well. It was NOWHERE near this.
Fascibnating to read an article like this
I'm going to make the king out of a linear accelerator. For the pawns I'll use my run-of-the-mill 5 keV cyclotrons.
A friend of mine in the physics program at Rutgers built the can crusher demo they have. It discharges a huge HV paper-oil capacitor through a coil of copper tubing about six or seven turns long, wrapped around a plexiglass tube. You put the can in the tube, close the switch, and POW the can is instantly crushed into a hot crumpled aluminum stick the width of your thumb because the field sets up a countercurrent in the can which repels the main coils. Even my girlfriend was impressed. We used to discharge the capacitor bank across thin wire-wrap wire, which vaporizes pretty well. He's working at some military contractor nowadays, working on ultrapowerful lasers. Which probably suits him better than the fiber optic sissy lasers he was working on before the telecom crash.
Another thing you should know if you take physics at Rutgers is that the physics auditorium is probably exposing you to mercury vapor. Legend has it that they did a "mercury hammer" demo one time with liquid nitrogen, where you pour the mercury in and freeze it, then pull it out and pound nails with it. Someone got the bright idea of passing the hammer around the room, and during its trip through the audience it started to drip. Only some of it made it back to the front of the room.
I think that would require you to build a 12-inch device of a different nature.
Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.
</Venkman>
Just seemed appropriate...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
This goes to show you that you don't need megabucks to do good science! To many, half of science is the challenge, not the successes, but they are nice, of course [grin].
I don't see why this mind-set couldn't be used for teaching science and computers on the high school level....Find a company that is getting rid of their dozens of old Pentium II system, get them to donate them to the highschool, and build a Beowulf or OpenMosix cluster to allow HS students to learn the fundamentals of supercomputing environments. Get a local university to help teach them...and you now have a chance of producing better educated computer geeks...and the physics & chemistry geeks and run small simulations as well.
Just an idea...
ttyl
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
That sounds a good idea to me. If they can get that to work, then that would be very interesting!
1 MeV... 1 Million electron volts
Zzzzzz
The 1961 Bevatron was something like 6.5 Billion electron volts.
What next, the guys build their own crystal radio?
Miles Monroe: Perform sex? Uh, uh, I don't think I'm up to a performance, but I'll rehearse with you, if you like.
Luna Schlosser: Okay. I just thought you might want to; they have a machine here.
Miles Monroe: Machine? I'm not getting into that thing. I, I'm strictly a hand operator; you know, I, I... I don't like anything with moving parts that are not my own.
..imagine a Beowolf cluster of .... oh, never mind...
As if men weren't already at a high enough risk of RSI.
You must be new here.
Folks,
Go out and get yourself a copy of "The Amateur Scientist" collection on CD.
For those of you who are too young to remember the column, or before it was dumbed down, Scientific American had a column called "The Amateur Scientist" - they had plans for a cyclotron, a SERIOUSLY high power CO2 laser and LOTS of other things that could get you hurt in a real hurry. And they showed REAL experiments, and REAL science in that column.
Of course, that was before SciAmerican got dumbed down, became half ads, and became PC - you could actually find desenting views in REAL papers
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Now those in DC will try to get /. banned because this is an evil, scary device that terrorists might use for SOMETHING... ;->
The scary thing about the article is that it shows that 1930s/1940s technology is not the magic black art that most americans think. By that, I mean most americans are happy to think 'oh it takes such great amounts of technology and resources to build a nuke'... that was true - 60 years ago. For us to think that we've kept the lid closed on these types of weapons-technology only further pushes us into false senses of security. Its better that we strike now, blast everyone else into pre-stone age technology, so that the american Malls remain safe for all those dutiful shoppers.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
I will resist making o/c comments on this post.
I will resist making fanboy comments on this post.
I will resist making riaa/mpaa comments on this post.
I will resist making political/outsourcing comments on this post.
I will resist making "that's nothing, i used to make my cyclotrons with a couple of diodes and a pizza box" comments on this post.
Amen.
That being said, it's a welcome change reading some genuinely good posts like this one (and the one on chess pieces yesterday). IMHO, one of the reasons that Americans should be proud of themselves is their ability and willingness to DIY just about anything. I hold people like Tim Koeth in higher regard than than any theoretical scientist anyday.
something seems fishy. how can 12" magnet weigh 2.5 tons? 1 cu ft of iron weighs little less than quarter of ton.
"my girlfriend started screaming that [the power supply] was falling through the car." It turned out that the 400pound box was safe, but it crushed the jump seats in his mom's car. "
"Later, Koeth found a 12inch magnet at Argonne National Laboratory. It weighed two and half tons..."
One can only hope that he found better transportation for this one.
Iron has density of 7.8 g/cm^3. This manes, 1 cu ft of iron weighs little under 0.25 ton. So how does 12" magnet 2.5 ton?
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,510054502,00 .html
It never seemed to me like it was actually fusion, but hey, whatever...
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Despite any silly comments and jokes posted about this, I feel compelled to say how impressed I am to see people taking such initiative. Such fearlessness in one of the great elements of the human character.
You must not know that it was a pun on his name. The word "hentai" means pervert...
... in Japan!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...and it's impressive
...when most cyclotrons are only around 5.5 inches.
This can make long meetings more enjoyable. But I am worried about commutes.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
As a grad student in physics i've aided my professor in the construction of a VSM (vibrating sample magnetometer, 5T sweep field) and a low-temperature MOKE (magneto-optical Kerr effect) system which is housed in a vacuum chamber. I've had absolutely no fun dealing with hivac systems. So many parameters; such as the oil on your body, hair, microscopic defects in gaskets, and miniscule amounts of dust can really play a role on the vacuum that can be achieved. Then comes the fun of finding the leaks...ahhh! All in all, it was a good experience, though. So go build something. Take it easy.
seriously guys.. I'm scientificly retarded, what do these things do?
You could always try reversing the polarity.
Or sendng in a tachyon stream....
After reading a very good book on all kinds of Physics experiments from the late 50's I decided to build a linear accelerator, I lived on a farm at the time and all the needed materials were at hand (as well as a fully equipped machine shop) it was roughly 40ft long and ran along side the chiken coop my grandad thought I was nuts, my dad thought it was great, I had fun with it for about a week until popping fuses annoyed my grandad to the point he said scrap it.
A cyclotron seemed like the easy route.
Almost everything on /. lately has been a repost of old news. It's been a trend for at least 6 months now. Just most /.ers don't actually RTFA and realize this. The worst part is, the editors don't either
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
I want to build a *calutron*! BTW, made an ion seperation mass spectrometer my junior year in high school.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I was a sophomore in Tom Devlin's physics class at Rutgers in 1995 too. I don't remember this guy (it was a big class, so that's not too surprising), but I do remember loving Prof. Devlin's lectures. Bravo!
1. Build Cyclotron
2. ???
3. Profit!
Achille Talon
Hop!
The Orgasmatron was originally from Barbarella.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Would someone please talk about Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" column again? Mentioning it only ten or twenty times just wasn't enough for me.
Modded "Redundant" in 3... 2... 1.........
....that .sig! You wouldn't happen to "...want to be consequence free..." would you?
Newfie music RAWKS!
Got mead?
I've been looking at this for a while now. Unfortunately returning it is difficult, (my lawyer could do it, but I don't think I could) so I refuse to order it unless I know it will work on my computer. So far all I've been able to find is that it works on Microsoft systems. Not to helpful when I don't own one.
So, since you have a copy, if I mount the CD on my linux/FreeBSD system, will I be able to read the articles?
I want to learn how to build my very own Cybertron!
kind of stuff Slashdot should be posting. Absolutely fascinating... What the hell is a cyclotron?
I was at the International Science Fair back in 1995 in Toronto competing in the physics division. The guy next to me had built his own cyclotron and had done very well three out of the four years he competed in high school science fairs (which eventuall lead to the ISEF). Rumor was -- and this is only a rumor -- that he made himself ill with the radiation from the experiment. I'm not sure of the specifics but it is definitely worth being being careful before building your own cyclotron. I recall having looked into building my own at one point and determining that it would be dangerous.
Duh. All they need to do it tweak the modulation of the dilithium intercharger and it should increase their power output to within 6 megajoules of the optimum phase dispersion. Jeez, they teach this stuff in Basic Warp Drive Physics 101 at the Academy...
Back in the day, I had a resonance cascade... :'O
*rolls eyes*
You obviously have never designed or shimmed a magnet before - makes perfect sense to me (BTDT) - then again I get paid to work on magnets.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
...to owning my very own orbital ion cannon. Anyone interesting in focusing that beautiful red stream of death out the bottom of that thing?
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I forget. Was that Duran Duran's organ or the pill-sex thing?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Was cyclotron the name of the bad guy leader in the show go-bots... or does my memory decieve me?
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/xmas_webcam
Ooh. Fighting over the remote will never be the same. ;)
It was Duran Duran's organ. The pill was how they made "love" on Earth. Dildano was the one who used the pill with Barbarella, despite not knowing whether or not their psycho cardiograms were in perfect harmony.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
My physic professor in college wistfully relayed a story of driving to Oakridge Tennessee where a cyclotron surrounded the campus. It reminded him of his student days at California in the 30's when he held the first cyclotron in his hands.
They can irradiate drugs to create radioactive tracers for the local radiology labs and make a killing doing it too!
By the end of the year, they'd have gone and paid off their little investment.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Could anyone tell me what anti-matter tastes like?
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!
"Building your own cyclotron? Thats easy. What you have to do is build a linear accelerator"- Steve Urkel
Stuyvesant High School used to have a cyclotron back in the 1960s. I think Mayor Wagner came to the dedication. I'm not sure what it was used for. Perhaps making isotopes. By the late 60s it was somewhere down in the basement, unused. The IBM 1130 was the big toy by then. Welcome to the future.
Simpsons Reference...
Ever.
Cancer cells are often, but not always, 'weaker' than normal cells. There is a macabre rumor going around about doctors making bets as to whether the chemotherapy or radation therapy will kill the patient or the cancer first.
I'm building an online version of an exhibit for the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, on the century of physics between 1868-1986. I got to handle what might be the original cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence. It's either the original or a model of the original. Check it out:
i t2/p3p2.htm#s2
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ashon/bancroft/exhib
Check out the backstory and the rest of the exhibit. There's scans of the journal articles Ernest Lawrence may have read that inspired his invention of the cyclotron.
The exhibit will soon be posted at the Bancroft Library's official website:
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
My contact info can be found at my website:
http://andrewhon.org/
LPA=Linear Particle Accelerator.
It was for a science project. Knocked up 200kV using a Tesla coil and put it through a 1m tube which was meant to be hard vacuum. Aim was to hit a lithium target and measure the particles coming off.Problem was getting a hard enough vacuum with affordable pumps. If it's not very good, and ours wasn't, the high energy electrons hit the air mixture and you get a truckload of radiation you don't want rather than ions of stuff you do. Ours blackened "sealed" photographic paper 10' away after about a minute... The thing glowed a rather spiffy ultraviolet when it ran and insulating it was a nightmare with 6" sparks all over the place, including to nearby humans.(But very low current).You could see them track down the glass legs the thing sitting on. Way cool..
It is a late reply so probably no one will see it, but I'll answer anyway. I remember reading a book Hyperspace by Michio Kaku something between ten and twenty years ago. In that book he wrote that he had built a cyclotron when he was a kid. There were no technical details, but you could probably find more in other of his publication, or after contacting him. He has a website MKaku.org. Good luck.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."