Jonny69's inventing laboratory: home made particle accelerator

[Jonny69]

I was sitting in one of the meeting rooms at work with a couple of colleagues the other week, drinking coffee and generally chatting rubbish as you do. One of my colleagues was trying to screw together a prototype for the world's first supercapacitor run with octopus shaped carbon nanotubes while me and the other chap were sat there with our feet up on the table. The managing director walked past with a load of important looking people and raised an eyebrow, but I don't think he really knew what was going on.

We were talking about CERN and then how cool it might be to make our own particle accelerator in the office, just a small one, but it would be powerful enough to zap stuff and maybe put on a bit of a mad light show and maybe at least blow up spectacularly if it went wrong. So I had a look online about particle accelerators and forgot that most nights I'm sat in front of a fairly large one, in the form of my knackered old telly I found dumped in my front garden.

So there's the source of my particles. It's a cathode ray tube, so it's electrons we're talking about here, and a control grid to play with the direction. Crank up the power ridiculously high and there's a nice strong source of electromagnetic particles to play with.

I really wanted a donut shaped particle accelerator but it was looking increasingly complicated to set up. The particles have to be directed round the tube under control with magnets and I wasn't convinced I was clever enough to do this with a load of magnets nicked out the speakers in the hi-fi, then change the control it so I could fire them out a tube on the side into something. I decided to go for a straight tube, or linear particle accelerator, which just needs a high voltage grid for the accelerating and all your particles just get accelerated out the end.

I need to point out here that I'm no particle physicist and I have no idea what I'm doing. This was starting to look more and more like a ray gun in my mind. I decided to seek professional help.

The bad news is I've been warned NOT to try and build this. I've been told at the very least I'll probably end up with nasty radiation burns and at most I'll die slowly and painfully. I keep getting this mental picture of firing the thing up only to find it's too dangerous to stand near, not being able to turn it off, and my office being isolated as a radiation hazard.

Ah well

 

[Jonny69]

Since when has being told not to build something ever stopped you?

Well that's a good point. It was a good friend and he did say you'd have to be really stupid to build something like that because you can't see what damage it's doing you. Plus if it does get you, the damage might not show for some time and it's irreparable. I figured since you know where you stand with fire and botched machinery I'd stick with that

 

[Jonny69]

Haha, you make it seems so mundane, and easy that some guy was just throwing together a supercapacitor made with carbon nano tubes. All I can picture is some guy in the corner with his tongue poking out, fumbling with a mini screw driver.
Are you allowed to tell us about that.

It's a she

edit: and she did look a lot like that when she was doing it

 

[Jonny69]

I'm feeling pressure from all sides to build this thing. I think it might have to happen

 

[Jonny69]

Right, the plan is this. Forget the telly, I have a better idea. I'm going to wire up an exciter coil (alright, it's a spare car coil) on a 555 timer circuit running at high frequency and a couple of tonky electrodes. This should give me a nice plasma style burst of sparks, or source of electrons if I understand it correctly. I conveniently have about 550V DC @100mA if I piggyback some wires into the side of my valve amp. I'm going to wind a long coil round the outside of a tube, sparks at one end, open at the other and the coil ought to produce a strong enough magnetic field to really blast some stuff nasty out of it.

I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what it's going to do. I'll fire it at a pile of fairy cakes to start with and assess the damage

Question: do I make the tube out of toilet roll tubes or bean cans gaffer taped together?