Particle Accelerator

[Phailure]

I was reading Michio Kaku's book "Hyperspace" when he described how he build a particle accelerator that fits in a garage. I was wondering what are some of the materials i would need to build one. I have a couple of years to build this if necessary.

Thanks for your attention

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

Building a particle accelerator sounds like a really interesting, but very ambitious undertaking. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Science Buddies has not seriously studied or supported in any way such a project. You may find some useful information in these web links:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=118622

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 9982124908#

http://www.ifpan.edu.pl/firststep/aw-wo ... neller.pdf

http://www.niell.org/linac.html

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 721AAoJyyL

Here is a plan for a Wilson Cloud Chamber, possibly also of interest:

http://www.scienceinschool.org/2010/issue14/cloud

This page has a link to a copy of a Scientific American magazine Amateur Scientist article on building an accelerator. This should be of extreme interest to you:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/view ... p?tid=8009

I hope this is enough information to get you started. This is likely to be an extremely challenging project. It would be an very good idea to seek a mentor with training In particle physics if you become serious about pursueing this. People with the right background might be found at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center or the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory or other University Physics departments,especially those having associated high energy particle accelerator research labs.

I wish you every success in this project!

Best regards,

Barrett L Tomlinson

[deleted-71712]

Hi Phailure,

This sounds like a really fun long-term project -- but I second Barrett's suggestion that you find a mentor. This is a complicated project and detailed advice is beyond the scope of this forum; it also will inevitably involve lots of electronics work, which is notoriously difficult to troubleshoot over the internet. It would also be good to have someone around who's familiar with all the safety concerns. In addition to things like sawing and soldering you'd be working with high voltages, and materials that are continually bombarded by particles of high enough energy (walls of the device, etc) can actually become radioactive...

... which raises the question: To what energy do you want to accelerate particles? A cathode ray tube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube), used in old monitors and TVs, is the simplest form of particle accelerator. As a starter project, you could build one or buy one and turn it into an oscilloscope:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To- ... illoscope/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... cilloscope

To get to energies at the current frontiers of particle-physics research requires accelerators that are physically enormous, requiring years to build and funding from national governments, even multiple countries (see CERN, the LHC, Fermilab, etc). As a result many of the results are derived from the combined efforts of hundreds of people. There are some people who work on building components (especially detectors), some who write programs to interpret the data, some who spend all their time figuring out what theories the data is consistent with. This might be of interest: http://www-d0.fnal.gov/public/index.html

So hopefully the above gives you some perspective for the purpose of contacting a potential mentor, probably a university professor or staff scientist at an accelerator. On that note, there are also accelerators that are used not for particle physics research but just to produce known high-energy particles for materials characterization and other experiments; some locations in the US are the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab (Chicago), the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Lab (near Knoxville), and the NCNR at NIST (Maryland). Fermilab, also near Chicago, is probably the biggest high-energy particle physics center in the US. However, there are people at many university physics departments involved in particle physics, including those geographically distant from where the research actually takes place due to the large-scale collaborative nature of the field. Anyway, you could approach someone local who does the kind of work you're interested in and ask if you could help out around the lab in some way or even if they'd help you with a project for a science fair. If you don't live near a university, try putting "summer research high school" into a search engine -- some universities have internship-type programs for high-school students. You'd still probably want to contact the scientists you'd want to work with.

Good luck,
Amanda

[deleted-71360]

This is a difficult project with many difficulties. Wish you the best.

A few thoughts:
How much money do you have?
Hou much time do you have?
Do you have access to a machine shop?
What kind of instrumentation do you have or can get?
Can you find a place that you can lock up and be totally secure?
This may involve dangerous levels of power and energy.
May produce some dangerous radiation.
Do you have a mentor?
Are you willing to invest two years of your life in this project?
Do you have a good supportive family?

[Phailure]

Thanks for the help. The thing I need now is a mentor, I live in Boston. Does anyone know where I can find one there?

[deleted-71712]

There are LOTS of universities in your city. Like I said, look at the interests of researchers in physics departments. Good luck.

Amanda