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
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I used to see the traces in the clouds too. But that was from something else "back in the 60's"
ReplyDeleteAren't the traces made by particles and not by waves? Alpha (2 protons + 2 neutrons) and beta (positrons) particles?
ReplyDeleteWell yes, but they are also waves, right? A quick Google search says I was operating on the 1.224 nanometer band.
DeleteThat is so cool!!! Also thanks for finding the amateur scientist book. I used to peruse those Scientific American articles avidly at our public library in Ruidoso, NM.
ReplyDeleteA few dozen pages after the cloud detector, there's a chapter about a homemade atom smasher.
At one point in the late '80s, our high school had no fewer than three particle acccelerators. It had a Van de Graaff similar to the one in the book chapter but with a much larger dome constructed out of an air force aluminum sphere used for radar target practice; a tesla coil powered accelerator; and a cyclotron that I built. Thanks to our very kind physics teacher, we were in the lab at all hours of the night for a couple of years.
One of us, Dan Davis, went on to do lightning experiments at New Mexico Tech. PBS Nova caught one on film:
https://youtu.be/kP9kjmal8Js?si=v9n4NxKgblP5v0PK&t=1245
Later Dan worked at the Boston Museum of Science and worked with their Tesla Coils and Van de Graafs:
https://youtu.be/FbDnHoHdx3c?si=dwnHlFCG-uXBxf_H