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M$1 October 12, 2009 05:42 PM

What materials would someone need to build a particle accelerator at home?

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October 12, 2009 07:38 PM
Depending on the particle, you may actually have one in your home... If you haven't thrown it out yet

The Cathode Ray Tube, found in non flat screen TVs works by accelerating electrons towards a phosphor screen where they produce visible light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pv-91GJHcg

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question694.htm


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October 12, 2009 07:42 PM
Interesting. I still watch tv on a CRT television.

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October 12, 2009 08:18 PM
In principle all you need is a DC voltage source (e.g. battery), a particle source (e.g a heating coil powered e.g. by your wall socket AC electricity would provide an electron source), some wires, and metal plates.

You'd hook up the plates to the battery terminals using the wires, place the plates such that the negative plate is near the coil and the positive plate on the other side of the coil, and at a bit of a remove.

The issue of course is that the energy the particles would be accelerated to is very low (e.g. for a 1.5V battery, the highest energy would be 1.5 eV). Another issue is that much of the flux would be scattered by the air between the plates. Finally, there would still be the problem of measuring the particle flux to show that you actually have particles being accelerated. However that last is not part of the accelerator, just a verification.

The above is a bare-bones, primitive linear accelerator. Building a circular accelerator is much more complicated in terms of the magnetic fields needed to keep the particles in a circular "race-track" as well as having much lower likelihood of the particles staying in the beam after multiple circles through atmosphere.

You would improve both types of accelerator greatly if you could evacuate the air from the volume in which the particles travel. This would require a vacuum containment vessel and a vacuum pump.

For comparison, the energy per particle in the highest energy electron accelerator ever built (the circular Large Electron Proton machine or LEP at CERN, outside Geneva, Switzerland - www.cern.ch) was ~45 GeV. That's 30,000,000,000 times higher than the 1.5 eV mentioned above. Another big difference is that LEP was a collider, where two counter-rotating beams (electrons in one, positrons or positive electrons in the other) were steered very precisely, such that tight bunches of electrons crossed at the same time as tight bunches of positrons in very tiny interaction regions at the centers of several multi-story sized detectors.

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October 12, 2009 08:39 PM
Those are great explanations. I now can see the difference and can understand the need for the circular casement. Are there any dangers in building the linear accelerator at home?

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October 12, 2009 08:47 PM
To get a powerful accelerator would require replacing the simple battery with a high voltage DC source, which is hazardous. If you manage to generate a high flux of high energy particles, that would cause a radiation hazard. If you left the beam on for a long time you would probably activate (i.e. render radioactive) whatever material is in the beam (e.g. the metal plate, any shielding behind it, etc.).

Please note that this is not really a smart thing to build in your garage (or basement, or home). People who build particle accelerators and people who operate them are trained as radiation workers. There are lots of safety interlocks, etc. preventing irradiation accidents. There are shielding blocks made of concrete, with earthen berms, etc. and the beams are surveyed to make sure no radiation escapes to harm innocent bystanders.

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October 12, 2009 10:13 PM
It is not difficult to create a high voltage source at home. The following are instructions on building a 12,000 voltage source at home with easily available materials:

http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro6.html

High voltage sources are not dangerous as long as they don't also have high current.

It is not possible to create the necessary energy for a home particle accelerator to be a radiation hazard, or to make anything radiative.

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October 12, 2009 11:43 PM
12 kV is not high enough energy to be considered a true high energy accelerator. For that you'd need many orders of magnitude higher voltage. The research accelerators of decades ago were about 10 MeV to 100 MeV, requiring a total accelerating potential of 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 V. Part of the reason for building circular accelerators is to be able to use the same acceleration cavities many times on the same particle. Research accelerators these days also have several different accelerators, each tuned to a different energy region. That way they gradually increase the energy of the beams from very low to low, to medium, to high, to very high, etc.

Once you reach particle energies in the MeV range you start getting to where you can irradiate things. Of course X-ray machines can cause radiation damage far below MeV. I believe typical dentist X-ray machines emit photons (X-rays) at energies of about 50 keV.

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