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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 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.
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.
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,510054502,00 .html
It never seemed to me like it was actually fusion, but hey, whatever...
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.