have you made any strange particle detectors?

[sarepairman2]

this thread is dedicated for oddball detectors (i.e. not the analog front end for a Geiger tube).

weird physics experiment particle detector thingies

[Dajgoro]

I once got do a demonstration for a science fair with a scintillator and photomultiplier tube. I first bought some old soviet one from ebay, but later I got one donated by a forum member which was of decent quality, and I could directly connect it to a oscilloscope and see when something would hit the scintillator. I had some household items that were slightly radioactive to demonstrate it works.

[JimRemington]

Gold leaf electroscope radiation detector.

I made one out of thin aluminum foil from chewing gum wrappers, hung from a cork stopper in a home canning jar, to go into my family's "atomic bomb survival kit" in about 1961.

[HAL-42b]

Not exactly a particle detector but somewhat in the neighborhood.

At one time I was interested in measuring flatness and straightness to extreme accuracies over large distances. I came across these guys from CERN who have come up with a novel way to measure that and it is also open source work.

They are using a taut string between two points and are looking at it with two microscopes at 90 degree angle to each other. When all the errors are accounted for the measurement is extremely precise. This is actually better than using auto-collimators because it does a direct measurement of the displacement instead of comparing adjacent angles.



Science article

[dexters_lab]

this thread is dedicated for oddball detectors (i.e. not the analog front end for a Geiger tube).

weird physics experiment particle detector thingies

i started making a gamma spectrometer with a photomultiplier and some BC-408 scintillation plastic, it's unfinished like most of my projects 

[DenzilPenberthy]

Several of my colleagues are using diamond for radiation detection and spectroscopy. Apparently it's very resistant to radiation so is useful in very high dose places.

[LaserSteve]

Cut the lid off metal can JFETs with massive dies or large photodiodes...    Sees alphas and betas, X-ray to some extent... Works in the dark, as thin black mica or mylar films are hard to make...

But hard to find ancient Jfets..

Steve

[suicidaleggroll]

Not exactly a particle detector, but I recently inadvertently made a people detector.

It's a system with some high speed serial lines over jumper wires (temporarily, until the final PCB is made).  When nobody is in the office in the evenings or over the weekends everything is fine, I can remote SSH into the system and it's behaving flawlessly.  As soon as people start showing up in the morning, it starts freaking out and corrupting data.  The corruption happens pretty regularly for the duration of the day until the last person leaves, at which point it instantly cleans up and starts working great again.  I can even look at the log files on Monday to see if anybody came in to the office over the weekend, including when they arrived and when they left, to an accuracy of about 15 minutes!  It's in its own room that nobody uses, and it doesn't matter whether the door is open/closed or the lights on/off, it still works (as a people detector at least, not so much for its intended usage).

[Skimask]

(Keep in mind, for the most part, we didn't know what we were doing, or what we were accomplishing, or what, if anything we accomplished, and the details are somewhat sketchy after 30+ years,but it was neat nonetheless)

Back in high school (~1985 or so), a friend of mine, Paul, and I were doing some mild reading about radioactivity at the local library.  Somehow, we got it in our heads we could build a particle accelerator.
We "borrowed" a geiger counter from the high school for the weekend, picked up a spool of telephone wire, a chunk of 1 inch PVC pipe, and built up an oscillator from a HAM book we got from the library.  I don't remember what frequency range or power output, or even if we built it right at all.  In addition, we needed a source of radioactivity.  Back then, you could get your hands on fire detectors with americium in them.  Don't know if that's the case these days.
We wound all of the wire as tight as we could get it around the PVC pipe, hooked up the coil of wire to the oscillator, put the americium 'pellets' at one end, and the geiger counter at the other end.

With the oscillator off, the geiger count would click once in awhile, seems I remember maybe once every few seconds or so.
When we fired up the oscillator and ran it thru it's tuning, there was a few spots in the tuning where the geiger counter would start counting markedly faster than when the oscillator was off or not tuned correctly.

Like I said, don't know what we accomplished, if anything at all...but it was neat.

And no, we didn't stand in front of the business end of the tube or walk around with the americium in our pockets for days on end.  I think we used a pair of winter gloves to handle the stuff, but that was about it.  Not sure how much we could've possibly been hurt by the thing.  Should try to build another one up and see what happens.

[PointyOintment]

(Keep in mind, for the most part, we didn't know what we were doing, or what we were accomplishing, or what, if anything we accomplished, and the details are somewhat sketchy after 30+ years,but it was neat nonetheless)

Back in high school (~1985 or so), a friend of mine, Paul, and I were doing some mild reading about radioactivity at the local library.  Somehow, we got it in our heads we could build a particle accelerator.
We "borrowed" a geiger counter from the high school for the weekend, picked up a spool of telephone wire, a chunk of 1 inch PVC pipe, and built up an oscillator from a HAM book we got from the library.  I don't remember what frequency range or power output, or even if we built it right at all.  In addition, we needed a source of radioactivity.  Back then, you could get your hands on fire detectors with americium in them.  Don't know if that's the case these days.
We wound all of the wire as tight as we could get it around the PVC pipe, hooked up the coil of wire to the oscillator, put the americium 'pellets' at one end, and the geiger counter at the other end.

With the oscillator off, the geiger count would click once in awhile, seems I remember maybe once every few seconds or so.
When we fired up the oscillator and ran it thru it's tuning, there was a few spots in the tuning where the geiger counter would start counting markedly faster than when the oscillator was off or not tuned correctly.

Like I said, don't know what we accomplished, if anything at all...but it was neat.

I think you probably caused false positives by inducing currents in the Geiger counter.

[Skimask]

I think you probably caused false positives by inducing currents in the Geiger counter.

Could very well be the case.
From what I remember, it wasn't like this oscillator was a high power, multi-hundred watt thing.  Can't imagine it would've been more than a few Mhz at most, as I'm sure anything beyond that would've been out of our range of expertise at the time.

[John Heath]

I think you probably caused false positives by inducing currents in the Geiger counter.

Could very well be the case.
From what I remember, it wasn't like this oscillator was a high power, multi-hundred watt thing.  Can't imagine it would've been more than a few Mhz at most, as I'm sure anything beyond that would've been out of our range of expertise at the time.

I found an iphone app that uses the front camera as a Geiger counter. You put black tape over the lens then it monitors for hits. Being a science nerd the fire smoke detector was immediately taken apart for americium to test run this puppy. It worked rather well. It also shows where the hits took place on the camera from the background photo.

[Lesterwyatt]

I made an alpha particle spark detector some years ago.
Here is the link the the video:

Lester