Homemade particle accelerator?

Question

Hey guys, I'm interested in making a homemade particle accelerator as a science / for interests sake project this summer. Can anybody give me an idea how to make one, or point me towards a good website? Also, if you have a guess how much the materials would cost, that'd be nice too. Thanks! =)

Answer 1

If you are willing to settle for accelerating electrons, get a color TV. That's exactly what it does.

making one is quite a trick. You need a big vaccuum chamber at very low pressure, and strong magnetic and electrical fields, and detectors at the end.

Edit:

What you want is a flavor of cyclotron called a betatron. These are relatively simple and old machines, that could be built at home with enough time, money, and cleverness.

You need 7 basic components:  ion source, "D" magnets, accelerting magnets, power supply and controls for magnets, detector, vacuum enclosure, and vacuum pump. These should be researched and designed seperately.

Start with the magnets: do the calcs on the sites below to determine size and speed you want. Remember a TV tube does about 50kv for color, so you would want a lot more than that. Magnet design is basic physics, google search them.

Next, figure out the power supply. One approach is to charge capacitors. For a small machine, may be able to run continuously. The control circuitry will be another challenge.

The vacuum needs to be quite hard. Simpler types of pumps are called roughing pump. A roughing pump gets out 99.9% of the air, and gets the pressure low enough that the finish pump can functions. These often use cryogenics to get a hard vacuum. You really want to buy these, but I don't want to be the one to tell you how much they cost! There are non-cryo pumps too.

The structure of course, needs to be capable of resisting vacuum. This is actually the easiest part of the design.

I would still try to canabalize the TV set. You can use the high voltage section and the electron guns as your source, and the phosphor covered glass as the detector. Be carefull to let air slowly into the tube, breaking the vacuum, before you cut into the glass. There is likely a small glass nipple at the small end of the tube, where they originally applied the vacuum.

It will be quite a project, good luck!

Answer 2

In addition to the 2 answers you already have, let me add this, how much money do you have? The TV idea is your best bet since they are inexpensive, or you can just borrow one. As for a from ground zero to completed unit, if you have a few million laying around, as well as a team of scientists and engineers, as well as a host of technicians and electricians available, you might be able to pull it off.

Use the TV it is a great idea for the basic idea of what such an accelerator is, and what it does. I would suggest that you do a lot of research into what the big machines are, are used for, and as best as is possible, how they do it. A good report that is well understood, and is easy to read would be the best thing you can do for a good project. Show those who judge the program that you did your home work, and understand what you are talking about and that could make you a winner.

Answer 3

It's been done.  Some kid made a cyclotron and won the Westinghouse Science Search (or whatever it's called) maybe forty years ago.  Lots of coils and a vacuum chamber.  

Much of the work involved in such a project would involve the vacuum system, because you can't accelerate particles if they're gonna bang into air molecules.  I'm also going to guess that there's not much on the Web about this sort of thing, because much of the web is written by kids and every kid these days has been raised to be terrified of radiation.  

However, you could check two sources: one is the amasci site run by Bill Beaty (note spelling) and the other is the laser-builder's site, but I forget whose that is.

Answer 4

Do you really mean a particle accelerator? A Particle accelerator fires protons or electrons into a toroidal magnetic field.

I visited the Australian Synchrotron (http://www.synchrotron.vic.gov.au/conten... last month as an old work buddy of mine now works there. They fire electrons into a circular magnetic storage field. When they run a test they send some of the electrons through an alternating magnetic field. When the electrons change direction they give off light. Scientist use the light to conduct experiments.

The most famous particle accelerator is the one being build on the Swiss-French border at CERN (That bunch of geniuses that gave us the internet). http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/Rese... That will propel protons in opposite directions around a toroidal magnetic field in an attempt to make them collide to see what particles are given off. They will try to create a mini black hole (God help us all).

As these are both multi billion dollar projects I don't think that you mean a particle accelerator. Although a TV set does fire electrons at the screen which fluoresces when excited by electrons. TVs use lethal high voltages so I don't recommend playing around with them.

I think that you want to build a coil gun or Gauss gun. These are a series of coils that are charged in sequence to produce an magnetic field behind a projectile that push it along to the next coil which is switch on to push it further so that it accelerates. You can read about them here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun.

To build a coil gun you will need lots of wire, a strong power source, line drivers and an accurate timing mechanism (eg. 555 timers). One of my friends built one as part of his final year engineering project so I am not sure how simple they are to build. Maybe you can use some of the terms in the Wikipedia write up to find out more on the internet (if this is what you were meaning to build).

Hope this helps.