A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity

https://maurycyz.com/projects/spinthariscope/

by maurycyz • 4 months ago

74 30 4 months ago

maurycyz.com

dvh• 4 months ago

I tried the same with bananas. Got nothing.

kergonath• 4 months ago

Potassium-40 is not an alpha emitter.

fecal_henge• 4 months ago

Maybe he used banana as the scintillator.

DetroitThrow• 4 months ago

That's unrelated. He's been diligently substituting bananas in many experiments to mostly disappointment.

thadt• 4 months ago

Bananas are like XML that way. If you're not getting the results you want, you're just not using enough of them.

lukasschwab• 4 months ago

You won't make one at home, but cloud chambers[^1] reveal individual alpha particle tracks.

There's one in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris — blew my mind!

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber

Edit: turns out people make these at home all the time. Sick!

lukan• 4 months ago

Well, google for "DIY cloud chamber" did result in quite some entries. Apart from youtube channels, with the first entry a guide from CERN:

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/how-make-your-own-cl...

alnwlsn• 4 months ago

This can be done at home with a little effort. Less effort if you can get dry ice easily.

https://hackaday.com/2019/01/13/see-the-radioactive-world-wi...

Yenrabbit• 4 months ago

You can easily make them at home (source, I did last weekend!).

- Dry ice (mine came from something shipped cold)

- Dark piece of metal (I used a 3D printer hot bed) on top of dry ice to get cold

- IPA vapour (I poured some on a shop towel)

- Some transparent container to house it all - I found a glass display cube on the side of the road, fish tanks or Tupperware also work.

- Torch or something to provide side lighting

Very cool to see evidence of the particles zooming around us, can highly recommend.

r2_pilot• 4 months ago

If you haven't experienced a spinthariscope, I can highly recommend it. I bought one as a Christmas present for a buddy and we both enjoy its demonstration of radioactivity.

jcims• 4 months ago

UnitedNuclear has these and a bunch of other interesting tidbits if anyone wants to give it a try. I bought a small bottle of heavy water as well, which I of course sampled and can confirm it has a slightly sweet taste to it.

You really have to get your eyes adjusted to the dark to see anything with the spinthariscope. It ends up looking mostly like static on a green crt, but if your only reference frame is a cloud chamber, the volume of particles that are emitted from such a weak source is pretty remarkable.

cbm-vic-20• 4 months ago

Don't miss a chance to see the Cherenkov radiation effect at your local research reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

anfractuosity• 4 months ago

https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/ shows individual atoms.

DoctorOetker6• 4 months ago

I was hoping this would be an artists project page describing the passive imaging of radiation (i.e. not a simple X-ray scan).

Imagine a planar array where each pixel gathers counts like an MCA (multichannel analyzer), mounted in some lead pinhole camera obscura.

This would give an extremely wide range of channels didactically illustrating the presence of calcium in gypsum (dryboard etc), visually show backscatter, etc.

Such pictures of modern and old city scenes would be mesmerizing to watch, partially seeing into buildings, the ground, ...

jareklupinski3• 4 months ago

currently trying to make a flip-dot display (think https://theartistbreakfast.com/works/spectral-flashbacks-ser...) but with some kind of radiation detector behind each pixel that will flip the dot when something passes through

i made a small 3x3 proof of concept using more expensive geiger tubes, and their really long 'z-axis' lengths made 'traces' happen very often, like a persistent cloud chamber

trying to find a reliable semiconductor (read:cheaper) method i can scale to an arbitrary number of pixels, but something seems to happen in between the bench and the wall :(

DoctorOetker6• 4 months ago

How many pixels would you aim for?

I have considered

* scanning a linear array of BPW34 photodiodes, in a similar spirit to a scanner to cover a plane, each photodiode going to its own "MCA circuit" (TIA->cheap audio codec like those from Everest Semi). Either direct measurement of generated charge pulses or covering the photodiode with phosphor on aluminum foil or so

* cloud or bubble chamber (cloud chamber is less dense and will generate fewer events, so probably bubble chamber): instead of needing a large 2D or 1D array of parallel circuits, we image and track generated charged particles and use the trajectory starting end (less curved) to determine the source direction!

* consider X-ray crystallography, an incoming straight beam can diffract in many directions on a monocrystal. rotating say a silicon wafer, and measuring the incoming photon energies with one or more photodiode/MCA circuits we can assign a source likelihood distribution by keeping track of the orientation of the monocrystal. akin to sparse sampling but instead of masks its diffraction patterns.

If you have better ideas or variations in mind, let me know!

defrost4• 4 months ago

Takes a while to do an entire continent this way, luckily when you start in the 1970s it's all over by now.

* https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf

* https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA18007.pdf

Visualising full 256 channel multispectral data can be tricky, the approach taken above was to take the raw data and process it to create a false colour RGB image representing the strength and interaction between natural background potassium, thorium, and uranium.

DoctorOetker6• 4 months ago

Thank you for this reference! I had been looking for such data for a long time.

A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity

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