❌

Normal view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayMain stream

Cloud Chamber Finale

✇SolderSmoke Daily News
By: Bill Meara
27 April 2024 at 09:41

 

Today's aparatus (above).  Chamber is larger and I left the bottom sealed.  It sits directly atop a chunk of dry ice.  The spongeat the top is soaked in alcohol. 


This is a one minute clip.  It does seem a bit like watching paint dry, but you will see many atomic particles moving through the cloud. If you look to the right side of the screen you will see that the cloud has started to rain alcohol.  I will put additional clips on the Patreon site. 


Harry Cliff's wonderful book mentions the origins of the cloud chamber. 

Click for a better view. 

Click for a better view/

Here's an interesing site on cloud chambers: 


And here's another one: 



I think that is all I will do on the cloud chambers.  This was a lot of fun, but I am running out of dry ice.  There is, however, a lot of room for improvement and experimentation here, and a project likes this puts you in touch with the earliest days of particle physics (as Harry Cliff explains above). Good luck on 1.22 nanometers! Please let us know how you do. 

Here is one more look at the "output" of my cloud chamber.  This is a ten minute video.   You can see many traces in this. Check it out: 


Thank you Charles Wilson.  And thank you C.L. Stong. 

Soldersmoke Becomes Cloud Chamber Smoke!

✇Copasetic Flow
By: noreply@blogger.com (antigrav_kids KD0FNR)
26 April 2024 at 13:44

 Bill Meara over at Soldersmoke built a cloud chamber particle detector!

He has all the details on the Soldersmoke blog, including the plans for the detector and a few videos of particle traces.

Cloud Chamber de Soldersmoke

Between the chamber and the book the plan came from, it all put me in mind of the time Ruidoso High School had not one, not two, but three particle accelerator science fair projects occupying the high school lab. Including a Tesla Coil version, a cyclotron, and one of these highlighted in the plan book Bill links above:



From  "The Amateur Scientist" by C. L. Strong

 (The cyclotron was mine.)


Big Success with Cloud Chamber

✇SolderSmoke Daily News
By: Bill Meara
24 April 2024 at 21:41

 
My Cloud Chamber

It was time to take a break from building SSB transceivers.  I wanted to build something completely different.  I went with something that I've wanted to build since I was a kid. Sometime in the late 1960s, I read about a Wilson Cloud Chamber in the book "The Amateur Scientist" by C.L. Stong  (my mom got the book for me, at great sacrifice).  

You have to make a little cloud in a chamber.  When an atomic particle flies through (as they do!) it will leave a little trace in the cloud.  Cool.  Literally cool: This is a dry ice diffusion cloud chamber.  You make the cloud by putting isopropyl alcohol in blotter paper at the top of the chamber. You then cool the bottom part (a lot) using dry ice. The alcohol evaporates, then is cooled into a cloud by the low temperature of the dry ice. Fortunately, my local supermarket has started selling dry ice (it was harder to come by when I was a kid).  For the chamber, I used a plastic container from the same superpmarket. For the light source I used a little LED workshop flasllight.  

I saw traces immediately, while I was setting the thing up.   

Here are two videos of what I saw during that first hour:  

This one minute video shows the traces I saw.  Look for the little whisps of "smoke": 

This one shows a few more traces, but then BOOM at about 27 seconds.  Check it out.  What is that?  (Thinking about it some more, I think this may have just been some higher humidity air leaking into the chamber and condensing suddenly.) 

Here's the C.L Stong book.  My project begins on page 307

http://www.ke5fx.com/stong.pdf

So what band would this be?  Something in the nanometer range, right? 

Here is a video showing what you see in a large cloud chamber: 

https://www.exploratorium.edu/video/cloud-chamber


❌
❌