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Homemade Cyclotron (Particle Accelerator)

A 10" diameter operational cyclotron that can accelerate protons near the speed of light!

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The cyclotron was built using items found around my local area at a very cheap price or for free. A fridge compressor, cathode ray tube T.V., a microwave, and a fire extinguisher were used to build the cyclotron to be portable and accessible to anyone. The compressor acts a "roughing pump" and the fire extinguisher acts as a sorption pump. The inside of the extinguisher is filled with zeolite cat litter (acts as a molecular sieve) and the container is submerged in cool bath made out of acetone and dry ice to bring the temperature of about -78 degrees celsius. Cold enough to freeze the air molecules inside the vacuum chamber and trapping them with the cat litter. The total vacuum in the chamber is about 10 millitorr ( atmospheric pressure is about 760 torr ) which is good enough to accelerate protons. A cathode ray tube television is used to pick up the magnetic field from the cyclotrons magnetic poles.

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Perry wrote 02/06/2023 at 23:58 point

I  never thought about using cat litter as a sorbtion pump, does it work, i never can seem to get down further than -55 degrees F with a dry ice acetone slurry, are you finding it easy to get -78 ?    M y first roughing pumps 55 years ago were refridgerator compressors modified tgo use the low side.worked great.... I still use a lot of belt driven rotary vane roughing pumps then diffusion pumps  (used to use dry ice acetone slurry) now I cold trap the diffusion pump with a home made  cascaded peltier junction fan asperated on the (hot side) and the hot side taken thru the chamber wall (whatever chamber is being used) on aluminum rod thru put made using epoxy torr ( a special UHV epoxy, not cheap and no shelf life)......running in a vacuum lets tghese sucker get really cold, i hope to get = 40 F at least...i would ditch xry ice forever after that let me tell you........after that I woiuld scavange with an ion pump ( system topology not contraindicating that methods high voltgage requirments.....howd you build you dee's

keep  up the good hacks

Captain Cosmol

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