OMG you built a Lenard tube! I've always wanted to do this. Amazing as always, so glad to finally see a good video about this. If you do ever want to mess with higher voltages, look at a linear potential drop accelerator. Can be powered by a standard cheapo van-de-graff generator (they're also called van de graff accelerators for that reason) and you've already got all the stuff to build it basically. I suspect you could get the lichenberg figures working that way. Also on the list of things I've always wanted to build
My "every Amateur Scientist article ever" CD from Scientific American has that accelerator project It's called: How to Build a Machine to Produce Low-Energy Protons and Deuterons by C. L. Stong August, 1971
I really appreciate how this channel is filmed and edited. It's high quality without being gimmicky and slick like so many other UA-cam channels, which makes it easier to focus on the content and not the presentation (the lack of background music is especially refreshing).
Yeah, please never do the "...coming up right now!" or "Let's get started!" intros. Since they are always followed by a title sequence, they're per definition a lie anyway.
I've had a turbomolecular pump lying around for 2 years now from when I wanted to build a PVD chamber. But making the actual chamber was too much of a pain so the project got dustbinned.
@@Fj128 if true; it looks like it managed to mangle a few of the scan lines, possibly hit the decoding circuitry off to the side of the sensor array rather than hitting a sensor itself causing it to corrupt an entire row (or more) of pixels before stabilising again. that's my guess anyway
Things to put in the beam: CMOS / CCD sensor. Crookes radiometer Various (decapped?) ICs / semiconductors, see how their characteristics change voltage references / bandgaps Opamps Diodes transistors / mosfets
I’m a user of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, which has a 12GeV electron beam. Each aluminum ‘window’ is several millimeters thick to hold back the atmosphere, and so the beam traverses several centimeters of aluminum without losing much energy at all.
As electrons approach relativistic speeds, doesn't the thickness of the window decrease? I'd have to get my books out, but it seems like I remember something like that. Or maybe I'm full of it.
Loved it Ben. Next stop: demonstrate the wave character of the electron by placing a dual slit in the beam and a phosphorus screen behind it. Though, I must admit this experiment is a way more difficult than it sounds...
What is the wavelength? Yesterday, we made a microscope slide covered in candle soot and two needles taped together to create the slits. Worked. But that was a red laser (620nm?).
@@TheRainHarvester wavelength is indeed the problem. The wavelength is equal to the Planck constant divided by the particle momentum. With an electron, the wavelength will quickly be in the Angstrom range or lower. So using two needle scratches is not going to do the trick I'm afraid.
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I always marvel at your videos, but the comment section.. it's amazing how great community you've gathered on a platform none other than youtube. It's a pleasure to read these comments with so many insights and good questions. Your channel is like a microverse of curiosity, such a lovely place.
@@AppliedScience Anyone have samples of Chernobyl mold? The stuff that photosynthesizes gammas? Maybe it will grow, under e-beam. (Like the infamous Strain 121, thermophiles from the Black Smokers, use an autoclave for proper growth environment.) Hey, how can melanin stop gammas, when lead does not? I've heard rumors of using melanin for radiation shielding.
It's not that clever, assuming you're into a Birch reductions and whatnot... And who needs solvated electrons anyways? Walter White uses em lol haha rofl
... but if there is any worthwhile knowledge acquired from immersing all in NH3, then bombardment via electron, it's to prove the idea that the blue color observed when the lithium hits the NH3 really is free electrons in solution, and not some other hitherto-undisclosed phenomena
What about charge balance? You'd have no counter cation. I'm guessing it would just build up a static charge and stop long before any color can be seen.
Stick something under it and put your XRF detector next to it! Since you're firing electrons at something, you can get characteristic x-ray peaks out of it, just like you would with any regular x-ray tube. This is just how SEMs do it!
@Matthew Morycinski You're not going to get anywhere near the beam current when it goes through the atmosphere, and definitely nowhere near the Gaussian profile. I wouldn't expect the actual electron "current" to be more than 10% of the beam current. Even still, at 30keV 200uA you're not likely to do any significant damage if you run it for a minute or two while standing a meter or more away.
@@Spirit532 I guess dangerous is not the beam itself, but radiation from electrons hitting whole area of aluminum plate. Characteristic x-ray K-alpha emmision line of Aluminum is 1.48keV (~0.85nm) and I'm not sure how much of it can be stopped by thin glass tube and air. EDIT: I forgot about bremsstrahlung that has wide spectrum.
@@pavelperina7629 1.48keV would be stopped by a few mm of air. Braking radiation is more dangerous, but still, as said above, the amount would be negligible.
@@Spirit532 I'm not sure where to find information about xray opacity for various energies and materials, but someone told me that using aluminum and steel for shielding makes huge difference and that's why all SEM parts are from steel or iron and beam energy is limited to 30keV
I love how you show your process and explain why you do it that way. One day I hope to start a kind of lab of my own, and I love seeing all the different ways people use tools for various purposes. Thanks for the good content!
Humble improvement to previous comments: 1. Mist of fluorescent dye (e.g. zyglow). might need to dilute w/ alcohol. Mist w/ ultrasound. 2. Instead of bread, a standard test is agar in a petri dish. Touch with dirty fingers. Cover with plastic wrap (only 12 um thick). Sterilize! Thanks for another amazing video.
Thanks! Yes, good point. I've seen a lot of X-ray tubes just have a cup shaped reflector around the filament to help shape the beam. The cup is usually just electrically connected to the filament, so no special drive voltage needed. I also tried to find out why X-ray tubes never seem to have enhanced (eg barium) emitters like all common vacuum tubes. As near as I can tell, the problem is the high voltage electron impact on the metal target will create ions that are accelerated back toward the cathode, and would eventually destroy it. This is partially (or completely?) why early CRTs had ion traps in their electron guns? Maybe you know?
@@AppliedScience I haven't seen enhanced emitters in sealed tubes, aside from thoriated tungsten(embedded, not coated), but actively pumped lab tubes(micro/nanofocus) often have coated cathodes, which are replaceable. The cup is still the same Wehnelt that is in your SEM and such. Serves the same function, to pinch the beam.
Would love to see you expose a micro SD card to the beam (or some other array type device), I wonder if you could attempt to make a cool but completely useless image sensor out of it (although I suspect the wear leveling to be a problem on modern ones). Connecting a metal plate to an analog ammeter and to ground and moving it around in the beam would also be a really simple but cool demo. I also wonder if considering this thing is putting out a good watt or two of radiation (might have to crank it up a little for this work) I wonder if you could put the aerogel (or some other low thermal conductivity material) into the beam and then cross section it while filming with a thermal camera, I would expect to see an interesting pattern as the beam is absorbed by the material heating it. I also see a lot of people are suggesting a cloud chamber, I would love to see that as I don't really know what kind of trails this thing would make.
Just a NAND memory chip would be a better "ghetto image sensor" - assuming the electrons can make it through the packaging. MicroSDs would have the same exact issue though.
Very interesting experiment is when the chunk of plexiglass (acrilyc glass) exposed to electrons with energy about 5MeV. Electrons stucks in plastic and then when you pin it through with some grounded sharp thing, electrons are drain through this thing to ground and you get a little lightning inside that draws a 3D Lichtenberg figures. UPD: Oh! There is in video about it. )
@@ГуглГовно-м7н you can sand the packaging and the die itself if that wold help. It's called die lapping in extreme overclocking. They sand it thinner and mainly flatter for better thermal transfer.
an EPROM chip could be interesting, while constantly reading it to see if the bits just get erased (like with UV) or get wildly flipped around because of the electrons
we've got a winner here. chuck up the hot dog in the lathe and use the cross feed to evenly blast the entire surface with electrons. Or channel the ghost of Grant Thompson and cross-link some gummy bears.
Im not really informed about it here, but my assuption would be that there wouldn't be any visible damage, but more like it would cause cancer/irradiate and kill all the cells.
Wow! This channel deserve 10 million subscribers, I subscribed many science channels but no one is even close to this guy in coolness. Respect from india 🇮🇳
Should be possible in principle. You would have to be fighting the air a lot though. The beam is also crazy divergent since the electrons strongly repel each other, so collimation will be another issue to work out.
Scattering would be a problem (as you can see from the way the beam spreads out from the end of the tube, obviously more than how much it spreads out going down the tube.
Field strength in air is limited. Especially when ionizing particles are present. Nice idea though, use the electron beam to trigger sparks or make air conductive without sparks perhaps.
It'd be interesting to see its effect on a living thing - maybe part of a plant, or an agar plate with bacteria? I'm assuming it'd kill / sterilise the affected region very quickly.
@@AppliedScience maybe draw your logo with the beem in the petri dish lol. Btw unless I misheard you the e beam x links the extruded heatshrink tubing before it's expanded. That's what gives it a way to relax to its original size when you reheat it in use. You can over irradiate it in processing and make it brittle.
Well, that's actually hurling protons around. What you really want is time on SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), which is a two-mile long electron gun.
When I was little learning about science and I tried to build a laser with a flashlight, cardboard tube, and tinfoil. Ben is what my child mind thought I could do, go into the garage and build that crazy thing. Keep being awesome.
My father used to work in air traffic control for the RAF, I remember as a youngster (1960's) visiting him at work and seeing a small room full of CRT's all without phosphored screens. When a call sent by an aircraft it was received by multiple stations each remotely controlling a CRT, the beams projected across the room onto a large (presumably phosphored) screen to auto-triangulate the aircraft location. Hope my memory stands the test of time.
Ben is one of a kind, but you can check out tech ingridients, thought emporium, cody's lab. Action lab doesn't usually do these long projects, but has many small but amazing physics experiments.
There is a really great experiment that can be used to measure the beam energy from a particle accelerator. You place a block of clear acrylic in front of the accelerator and fire electrons into it - the rule of thumb that I had been told was that 10mm of penetration equated to 1MeV of energy. The acrylic block is such a good insulator that once the electrons have pernitrated it they can't escape and are trapped. Once you are at this stage you place the acrylic block on a hard surface and using a 'center punch' and a hammer you apply a shock in a very concentrated point. The shock wave that travels through the acrylic block dislodges the trapped electrons and they come rushing out. There is a very bright flash of light and the electrons come out with so much force that the structure of the acrylic block gets ripped apart (at a very minute scale). The resultant 'damage' in the acrylic block looks like a tree like structure with a central trunk (where the center punch was) and the trunk separates into smaller and smaller branches. You can then simple measure how high the 'tree' is to be able to work out the beam energy.
Wintergreen mints? Is there enough energy to light up something triboluminescent. Yes, I know - completely different unrelated process. That's why I'm curious.
I asked, for sure. When I saw the thumbnail I remembered one of my brilliant electronics expert uncles would say that you can play with the fly back voltages from a b&w TV, but by color the 20,000 volts puts you in the danger zone enough to matter.
At work we have 3 of these machines that crosslink polymers in plastic. Specs are: 200KV, up to 460 mA. 48" beam width. Typically runs absorbed dose of about 5.0 MR. Filaments run 13.5 Volts. The window is 2 micron titanium foil, in front of a copper foil backing ( water cooled to absorb heat) Vacuum is 6.2x10-7 Torr, generated by 10" CryoTorr cryopump. Thank goodness for interlocks.
Some ideas to try: 1. Put a hard metal in the beam and measure the increase of X-rays. 2. See what happens if you put a leaf foil in the beam path. 3. Epoxy a glass tube on the other side and see what happens with various gases at very low pressures (neon, Argon, CO2. also try a magnet or electromagnet coil to see if it deflects the beam. At much lower pressures you should be able to get the beam to travel further. 4. Make a tiny CRT tube instead of using the electron window, use a flat bottom closed tube or small erlenmeyer flask with the bottom coated with a phosphor & magnetic yokes to control the beam path.
About X-ray, you can get energy and convert it to wavelength using for example the following table www.jeolusa.com/DesktopModules/LiveContent/API/Image/Get?mid=4725&eid=1&Type=View&PortalId=2 But I don't know what the is efficiency is depending on beam energy and material. My experience is that with beam energy of 30keV (which is limit of SEMs due to safety restrictions) x-ray detector barely detects anything above 10keV and there's nothing above 18keV.
Graphene also makes an excellent vacuum barrier. Today, the sheets have less defects and you could stack up 5 and they would still only be ~ 15A thick. So, you get a lot less attenuation than through the silicon nitride. The nitride windows have also been used in SEM imaging for in-situ liquid environmental cells. Cultures are grown inside at ~atmosphere. You need to have a BSE detector and the cell cultures must be growing on the inside surface of the nitride membrane. You must also be careful not to focus the beam at too high a current and rupture the window. Which is likely what happened when you arced your source. If you coated the graphene with metal, you would produce a source of x-rays where the beam strikes the metal. Then you would only need a camera behind the target object. This simple x-ray tomography setup was made for inside SEMs by Gatan and Bruker. But nobody sells them today. Not enough demand. But they worked. You could make a simple version. I have considered revising the product. www.bruker.com/fileadmin/user_upload/8-PDF-Docs/X-rayDiffraction_ElementalAnalysis/Microanalysis_EBSD/Flyers/Fly_micro_CT_en_rev1_3_lowres.pdf The resolution is improved if you keep the metal foil closer to the focused beam and keep the target close to the x-ray source. But the concept is pretty straight forward. You can use you window with a metal costing as well, to produce the x-rays. Then put your thin low density target object (the x-rays must be able to penetrate) behind the x-rays source and capture images with a suitable camera. Rotate the object while taking images and create tomograms. There is open source python scripts for creating the 3D tomography. Similar membrane apertures have been used to make an “airSEM”. This is an odd company out of Israel and the product is b-nano. It works. Cornell has one. Niche market. www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1431927613004133 I have also done micro photogrammetry in the SEM. Which is very cool! I did a few presentations and tutorials on that. You could do that now with your SEM using the simple auxiliary rotation stage. Just like with the drill bit. Except each rotated image becomes input for the 3D object model.
We have a 1 MeV electron beam at work for cross-linking of cable insulations, some of which go into nuclear power plants. For more common applications there are cheaper ways of cross-linking plastics. The irradiation happens in a concrete bunker due to the safety aspects of the emitted radiation. Unfortunately I have not got to play with it too much... which is probably a good thing :) Correction of how the heat shrink works: You first manufacture the tube in its final shrunk size and then cross-link it. If you then heat it above its melting point it will not become liquid, but it is instead a "rubber" which you can stretch it by a lot. Cooling it in its stretched state will cause it to freeze in place, and it will only go back after heating above its melting point at a later stage. This is extra apparent if you use transparent heat shrinks (for example PTFE) as they are often milky at ambient temperature due to the crystals in the plastic, but at the temperature when it starts to shrink it usually turns transparent as the crystals melt. (Note: PTFE does not work well with electron beam crosslinking as it degrades (does not like radiation), but luckily it behaves as a cross-linked material already from the start due to the high amounts of chain-entanglements)
@Richard_Andersson have you encountered the early history? Arno B., trying to fall off an Alp? (His co-author was killed.) Capacitron in 1951 Popular Mechanics, in Life mag 1947. Also Lawrence and his Megavolt, publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5s200764&chunk.id=d0e2505&toc.depth=1 ALso see worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/SI-1928-06.pdf , Brasch tries to harness storm cloud as MV supply for atom-smashers.
Decapsulate a mosfet apply a bit of Vgs while in beam, stop the beam -> measure Vgs/Id at several steps, you will measure the shift of the Vth. With the same method you can measure the energy deposited in SiO2 in Gy (if the mosfet Vth variation wtr to Dose has been previously calibrated ) As usual, great work and great content. Cheers from CERN
Awesome video as always! One idea for another experiment: you could install a few solenoids in front of the cathode with incrementally increased B field to focus the beam to a tighter point. This could reduce the amount of wasted electrons that hit the anode and send more through the window. (I'm not sure if this vacuum tube is big enough for the number of windings and length needed, but I could run a quick simulation in Comsol if it seems like an idea worth trying.)
Magnetic lenses are incredibly difficult to control, they require a complex geometry of the core, that is why electrons are focused by electric fields much easier to create and control in CRTs and X-ray tubes, so this should be made inside the vacuum side, but it would fry the Lenard window. T he magnetic control is only used for the scan in CRTs for TVs and is electrostatic in CRTs for oscilloscopes because the TV screen is much larger, has a weird geometry and it is a pain in the ass to adjust, so most of the adjustment is made electrostatically. In electron microscopes most of the control is made by magnets several of them.
Your channel is great, subscribed. It's fun and educational, and that's what I like. Years ago, I found an big old school building, that I wanted to buy and live in. It's 13,000 sq. ft. As I was daydreaming about living there, I wondered how I would heat it. I'm into "alternative" stuff, as it was in those days. I finally realized I needed a small, intense heat source year-round, to run a generator and heat water, so I came up with my own design for a fusion reactor, using a collimated electron beam aimed down the axis of a cylinder. By my "best estimation" (lol) it would take 90% of its output to keep itself going. But I thought, WTH, all I need is some deuterium and tritium. It's probably a good thing I don't have a shop or access to power tools. Keep making awesome videos, thanks.
I'd be curious about giving atoms some extra electrons. Like what happens if you take a chunk of sodium, shoot it with this, then throw it in water? Will it be "supercharged" with even more electrons than usual, and release more energy when you activate it? Another idea: stick Styrofoam peanuts to something with static electricity (maybe the lid to a plastic tote container) and see if this thing can knock the peanuts off. Would this travel farther in helium/hydrogen due to lower density? That would be cool to see. What happens if you take a second tube with a second window at one end, phosphor at the other end, and vacuum inside? Can you put window to window, with a gap of 5mm or something, such that it traverses air, then goes back into vacuum, and then can travel another 10cm before striking phosphor to make a spot? That would be neat, transferring electrons from one vacuum chamber to another, across an air gap.
Since sodium is conductive, all of the charge would be located on the surface of the chunk and I think it would discharge as soon as it touched another material (even non-conductive, like the thing you're holding it with or water). Highly charged metals even emit electrons into the air, so I think there would be no difference between throwing sodium in water with and without exposing it to the beam first.
I work in the wire fabrication domain and yes, we do use electron beam accelerators to modify the molecular structure of the insulation material. We use Polyethylene in those types of wire. As for the benefits are as follow: higher current capacity (as the insulation is more resilient to heat) , they do not catch fire(they just turn black, but they do not flame out) and if they are burned by an external source they are more environmentally friendly. Our machine is only 800keV in power but I found out that it’s almost at the top of the power, or it was when fabricated, for this kind of machines. The OEM is Vivirad France, and great safety measures were taken by the oem and our facility to prevent irradiation of the personal. (Mainly x rays, but there are also gamma and betta radiations emited by the various materials struck by the electrons)
- Shoot some flames with electrons! - Try to charge metal items and see if you get a discharge from it OR charge non-conductive items and see if they repel each other - Try to make oil fly or move around Super interesting video as usual!
The patent for the flame rectification amplifier was issued Feb. 10, 1948, H. S. JONES 2,435,940 SAFETY CONTROL SYSTEM FOR FUEL BURNERS Original Filed July 29, l94l 500+ vac on a flame rod will pass a micro-amp pulsed D.C.through the flame. This is a flame detection circuit common in gas burners.
Can this be used to generate electride salts by just blasting an aqueous solution of some relatively electropositive salt/salts or something of the sort? Could be very useful to obtain an aggressive reductive agent without the need for special precursors.
The process of making Lichtenberg figures in clear acrylic is quite an experience - the flash of light and audible noise when you shock the acrylic with a sharp pointed center punch is quite impressive. The process works well when you have a few MeV - the rule of thumb I was told is that 1MeV produces about 5mm of penetration in the acrylic.
some time ago we played with a laser conduit to project plasma charge through the atmosphere quite a distance. rather than getting into the nitty gritty, here is the nuts and bolts of it. take a disc of some diameter. mount some Fabry Perot laser diodes around its perimeter facing toward the centre. grab some sort reflective medium , glass, diffraction grating or what ever to project the laser out perpendicular to the plate, just off centre.a small hole dead centre over the top of the electron window will suffice. mount all of this on some bearings with a few slip rings and spin it up. a stable laser conduit. obviously there are a few more niceties with collimating lenses on the disc but you get the idea the ultimate effect is, the air within the conduit becomes partially ionised allowing a far more conductive path for what ever charge you shove up its nose.
The electrons only have 25kev kinetic energy, so the highest charge they can give the acrylic is 25kv. This is not sufficient to cause much (any?) dielectric breakdown.
I don't think that's how it works. You have to think of the electrons like bullets penetrating into ballistic gel. For a given eV (ie. velocity) they are all going to pile up at the same location inside the material (at the Bragg peak) and get stuck there bc it's an insulator. The voltage gradient across the acrylic is then going to be a function of the number of electrons trapped inside, which itself is going to be dictated by the electron beam luminosity and beam exposure time rather than the electron energy. The electrons just pile up inside the insulator until the dielectric breakdown gradient is exceeded and a little lighting bolt finally spontaneously forms through it equalizing the voltage difference.
The speed of the electrons would determine how deeply in the material they can embed, or if they are repelled by the existing built-up charge in the material. But the charge on each electron is always the same, so getting a certain number of electrons into the center of the plastic should always have the same effect upon discharging them. As far as I know.
@@AppliedScience I don't know if electrons create positive or negative charge. You are adding some electrons, but at the same time they are causing emission of secondary electrons. Have you tried to measure current between sample and ground in your SEM? Speaking about SEM, way why not to use tungsten cathode and Wehnelt cylinder instead of light bulb?
You could try exposing a pc of pp or pe plastic to see if you could activate it enough to get glue to bond to it or fool around with the accudyne test pens to measure any change.
At 5:41, hence no one is near a 1MeV TEM checking to see if the column has been assembled correctly and not leaking X-rays LOL. As always you videos are great. Did you use your SEM HT for the 25Kv?
I'm really wondering why they made these square instead of circular (Talking bout the window, not the whole structure), i bet the stress reduction by doing that would make posible to manufacture these even thinner
@@AtlasReburdened i meant the small window, not the whole structure that it comes in, as Jack Allen mentioned it could very weel be due to the process used to make them
Hard (really hard) to make a round scribe or round cut in thin fragile material. Even making a square window in the SiN seems pretty hard to accomplish. But they did it. Perhaps laser cut???
@@gcr100 Oh, I wasn't aware that the window and it's 'frame' were a single piece. I guess that makes more sense though. That is interesting. I recall learning once that some echants used in simiconductor manufacture behave quite differently depending on the orientation of the atomic level crystalline structure so it may be that the cubic form of Silicon nitride is used, and is cut such that it's orientation permits the echant to preferentially 'eat away' in one direction which, given the cubic structure, would likely mean that a square window could be made with fewer flaws than one of any other shape. Just an educated guess though.
Gee... this really brought me into my PhD years. I remember we bought a bunch of those and I was trying to sputter deposit some amorphous material onto them and watch it crystallize in situ in TEM (every time I took them out of the sputterer I found them exploded). I almost was shocked when you mentioned that they can hold vacuum, since I remember how fragile they were (but at least the plasma thing in the beginning of the vid made me calm again). Amazing work, though, Ben! Huge fan of your channel!
Being in lock down, I've probably spent to much time on YT. That being so, I've just 'discovered' your postings. Your range of science knowledge, its explanation and its application is magnificent. you are a polymath! Being a bit weird, I have a utopian dream. 40% Polymath, 30% Farmers, 25% Artisans, 5% Entertainers, and 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% Politicians. Keep up the good work, I now have a favorite YT channel.
"Other than my finger" That hadn't even occurred to me. What would happen if something organic got close to that? Can you try this on like a hot dog or something?
I’d love to see you place a diamond in the electron beam. In my line of work I frequently place diamond samples into a scanning electron microscope to examine their luminescence to the electron beam and it would be really interesting to see how it would react in air.
You are so awesome you have people viewing your videos have no context... And then you have 90% of us who think they know what you're talking about... It's like having a nephew that's a lab teacher. And we can hate you because you are nephew.... God I love this channel
You could arrange 2 electrodes, each with one hole, in such a way that the beam passes through the first electrode and then through the second one. Then apply high voltage across the electrodes and you can observe how long electric arc can you create.
@@Asdayasman Thanks, nearly screwed up and picked Palladium. Gold sells for ~$63 per Gram and there is 197.0 g in a mole of Gold - Gold costs ~$12,411 per mole. Palladium sells for ~$78.37 per Gram and there is 106.42 g in a mole of Palladium - Palladium costs ~$8,340 per mole.
I love how you show how safe it is to irradiation is when sterilization is needed. Most of the time people freak out that their food is irradiated and they think they might get sick from it, when in reality it's safer being irradiated.
My dad was a physicist who designed field emission systems. In particular, he designed field emitter arrays for several systems. The big machine looked like a locomotive. It used a Marx surge pulse generator to generate high voltage at high current. It was charged at 8.6 kV and discharged at 2.5 MV. The pulse duration was in the 4 nS range. The pulse was directed into a cold cathode tube, which generated the electron beam. The device was used to x-ray bomb blasts in the desert, simulate atomic blasts, and radiation-harden semiconductors. If you were standing beside the unit, not in front, there was enough scattered radiation from one pulse to kill you.
Hermes, izzat you? I saw a great announcement from Project Hermes: they could repair it so very rapidly, that they could now fire over five pulses in a single week!
The bulb filament is probably an underperformer as an electron emitter. One could always try the filament of a vacuum valve/tube which is made of tungsten with a BaO (barium oxide) coating.
Old reactor plants on US navy ships can see cobalt-60 levels on the order of whole curies in some valves. Thankfully, we know where those valves are and can set up temporary lead shielding in the reactor compartment to reduce exposure. Attempts to reduce cobalt containing parts are being made, but those alloys are far superior to alternatives. The worst culprits are the control rod mechanisms, which must be as wear resistant as possible and as such are made of cobalt alloys. The cobalt-59 corrodes into the coolant and is activated by the neutron flux of the core. Later, it and other corrosion solids settle in valve bodies and low flow piping, causing hot spots.
Great video! You should try chilling the pink-calcite below 0c, then irradiate it, then watch it as it warms up to room temp. It will display thermoluminesence as it warms. I've made a few Lichtenberg figures on medical linacs, usually ones that are about to be removed. I've wanted to try pink calcite but haven't purchased any yet.
Thanks for the interesting video! Just wanted to mention that very thin transparent windows are also used in EUV photolithography for pellicles that prevent contamination of the photomask. EUV pellicles are less than 50nm thin.
@@busimagen Good point, although now that I think about it the advantage of this equipment is seeing the effect of beta rays at atmospheric pressure, could just put a steak in a vacuum chamber to do what I'm talking about :P
I'd seen that gopro video you mentioned before and was wondering what the dopant in those pieces of calcite were, now I know. Thanks for including that!
I used to be a high vacuum service engineer. I once serviced a vacuum pump for a high output x-ray gun inside of a concrete bunker used to crosslink plastic from a roll in a continuous process. It was one of the coolest service calls I had.
I used to work in a plant that made shrink film. One product line (LTF) was scanned with X-rays before the tube was blown out in the bubble tower to full size and cut into two flat panels for winding. The X-rays were meant to crosslink the molecules of the plastic to strengthen the film across the web, since the extrusion of the tube already laid the molecules out straight. One year, during Christmas shutdown, the X-ray generator wasn't shut off, while the cooling system was. The X-ray tube and the power supply that drove it were both destroyed. The vacuum pump also had to be replaced because it had been sucking water from the cooling system. I believe that system used a very large turbomolecular pump because it was held at such a deep vacuum. While the line was down for X-ray repair, we replaced the thin Titanium aperture sheet on the scanner output. It was crazy to see how damaged it was from the beam. I don't know how thick it was, but it was ridiculously sharp on the edges so I was wearing two Kevlar/Stainless Steel weave gloves to protect my hands during install.
Love it!! I used to service vacuum systems. I was called out to helium leak detect a vacuum system which maintained a high vacuum for an powerful x ray gun used to crosslink rubber in a continuous sheet. The x ray gun was inside a concrete bunker with very thick walls, the rubber belt would enter and exit through slots in the walls which were zig-zagged. When I was inside the room leak checking the system it was eerie knowing if they turned on the x-ray gun it was all over for me - like getting thousands of body x-rays all at once. There were of course multiple interlocks to prevent this such as a switch inside the room which prevents the x-ray gun from being switched on.
The cross-linking of PVC-wire insulation does not make it more flame resistant. The PVC gets mixed with Mg(OH)2 and when this heats up it reacts to MgO and water. The water then weakens the fire. The problem is, that just mixing Mg(OH)2 into the polymer makes it really brittle and basically unusable for insulation. The cross linking happens between the polymer and the Mg(OH)2 and makes it less brittle so it can be used in applications where elasticity is necessary again. If I remember correctly, the final product also surprisingly gets pink-ish. Another cool application is cross-linking a regular thermoplastic polymer after it was brought into its final shape. If you for example cross-link a plastic cup, you can heat it up above the glass transition temperature and deform it pretty severly (as it is typical for thermoplastics above their glass transition temperature). The deformed state will stay after cooling. If you heat the deformed cup up above its glass transition temperature again, the molecules can move more freely and go back to their original shap, the undeformed cup. It's almost like a shape-memory effect. Edit: In retrospect, that's probably the same procedure as with the heat shrink tubing.
At 07:00 you talk about the aluminum electrode "producing" less powerful X-rays than if it would be out of tungsten (or a harder metal in general). Could you elaborate why this is?
Google "characteristic xray" for explanation and " Energy table for EDS analysis" for energies of xray photons. It's not completely true that heavier atom emits higher energy because it never emits photons of higher energy than electron, but heavier atoms have more spectral lines. And characteristic xray is only part of emitted xrays.
You can cut the neck off of an old television picture tube and use the high voltage section from the same TV with a push-pull DC/DC converter and a new primary coil wound on the flyback transformer.. I did that as an attempt at a high school science project but never had a means of drawing down a good vacuum or a good window. Thanks for the heads-up on the epoxy resin!
For Lichtenberg figures you might try putting the whole apparatus in vacuum and skipping the window? You could go to a higher acceleration potential (with appropriate shielding) and would not deal with losses to the air. On my list of things to experiment with for sure.
It would be very interesting to see the results of Millikan's oil drop. Another idea would be to irritate yeast or a biologic item that would be effected. Would be a great example of electrons power.
Im a mechanic electric science physics chemistry and biology knowledge lover! Im realy enjoying your channel, therefore my subscribe to it. What I love the most about it, is how you explain the things in a way which is very comfortable for the listener to understand. You don't leave anything out. You guide us into the whole proces perfectly! My respects bro! I salute you :) Just Keep it coming! AND Don't you stop being awesome! My greetings from the Netherlands ;)
Interesting video. I worked in a manufacturing organization that used E-beam technology to irradiate materials. Most of our vaults ran at 1MEV. Occasionally we would break a window and it was quite explosive.
Chased a turbomolecullar vacuum pump for a few years on Ebay.. and it was way beyond my range $$$. it have to be really awesome to have one!! Never the less that is literally awesome video, and it actually expand one's knowledge.. specially about cancer radiation treatment....
Why couldn't a window 10x thicker dissipate 10x more heat? Is most of the heat being conducted to the air on the outer surface instead of conducting to the solid structure?
My suggestion: decap various ICs (ram, microcontrollers, basic 74 series logic) etc., and throw them in from of the electron beam while they're running. It would be cool to see what's required to change their state or crash them. Excellent video!
Probably not the most practical but you might be able to use the portable XRF gun detector to detect the X-rays given off when the electrons strike a target/material. Basically the same as EDS in an SEM. More surface sensitive than XRF.
OMG you built a Lenard tube! I've always wanted to do this. Amazing as always, so glad to finally see a good video about this. If you do ever want to mess with higher voltages, look at a linear potential drop accelerator. Can be powered by a standard cheapo van-de-graff generator (they're also called van de graff accelerators for that reason) and you've already got all the stuff to build it basically. I suspect you could get the lichenberg figures working that way. Also on the list of things I've always wanted to build
New idea, a yeast that emits electrons.
Two of my favorite channels!
@@andrewpast1959 Electric bacteria is what you may be thinking of.
@@andrewpast1959 Might as well just plug into an electric eel
My "every Amateur Scientist article ever" CD from Scientific American has that accelerator project
It's called:
How to Build a Machine to Produce Low-Energy Protons and Deuterons
by C. L. Stong
August, 1971
I really appreciate how this channel is filmed and edited. It's high quality without being gimmicky and slick like so many other UA-cam channels, which makes it easier to focus on the content and not the presentation (the lack of background music is especially refreshing).
Amen to that! Pointless background music drives me up the wall.
Yeah, please never do the "...coming up right now!" or "Let's get started!" intros. Since they are always followed by a title sequence, they're per definition a lie anyway.
Hear, hear!
We're gonna need a good vacuum, so conveniently, I had this turbomolecular pump laying around...
I've had a turbomolecular pump lying around for 2 years now from when I wanted to build a PVD chamber. But making the actual chamber was too much of a pain so the project got dustbinned.
Was looking for this comment. haha
Doesn't everyone have a turbo lying around from their DIY electron microscope project?
One of my favourite lines was "i built an electron microscope from things i had lying around in the garage"
Me: old timber and a broken kettle?
Sadly most of us are living in a vacuum...
10:34 xray hit the camera sensor
Oh wow, I didn't notice this. You might be right, as I've never seen a video artifact like this from my camera in "normal" circumstances.
Screenshot for anyone curious: i.imgur.com/nyIHjFN.png
That's a weird artifact!
@@Fj128 if true; it looks like it managed to mangle a few of the scan lines, possibly hit the decoding circuitry off to the side of the sensor array rather than hitting a sensor itself causing it to corrupt an entire row (or more) of pixels before stabilising again. that's my guess anyway
@@RonLaws yes i thought the same before seeing ur comment
I also noticed this and immediately thought the xray had messed up some part of the camera temporarily.
Things to put in the beam:
CMOS / CCD sensor.
Crookes radiometer
Various (decapped?) ICs / semiconductors, see how their characteristics change
voltage references / bandgaps
Opamps
Diodes
transistors / mosfets
10:35 - CMOS sensor says hi!
Oh man, yes please! Would be super keen to see what effect this has on common electrical components
Don't forget about ants. That would be awesome to see.
EPROM Chip?
flash would be interesting too
I’m a user of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, which has a 12GeV electron beam. Each aluminum ‘window’ is several millimeters thick to hold back the atmosphere, and so the beam traverses several centimeters of aluminum without losing much energy at all.
As electrons approach relativistic speeds, doesn't the thickness of the window decrease? I'd have to get my books out, but it seems like I remember something like that. Or maybe I'm full of it.
At 12GeV, I believe it! Will you take viewer's suggestions to put stuff in the beam as well? ;-)
so there is no actual window? the beam just leaks out?
@@RelianceIndustriesLtd depends on your definition of window
For those who are interested the Bethe formula
describes the energy loss of a charged particle passing through matter.
A 100nm membrane supporting 1 atmosphere of pressure is absolutely mind-blowing
Loved it Ben. Next stop: demonstrate the wave character of the electron by placing a dual slit in the beam and a phosphorus screen behind it. Though, I must admit this experiment is a way more difficult than it sounds...
Classic
yeah its difficult becaus you need very narrow slids very close together right?
What is the wavelength? Yesterday, we made a microscope slide covered in candle soot and two needles taped together to create the slits. Worked. But that was a red laser (620nm?).
Would be better done inside a vacuum chamber. Maybe using the electron microscope?
@@TheRainHarvester wavelength is indeed the problem. The wavelength is equal to the Planck constant divided by the particle momentum. With an electron, the wavelength will quickly be in the Angstrom range or lower. So using two needle scratches is not going to do the trick I'm afraid.
I always marvel at your videos, but the comment section.. it's amazing how great community you've gathered on a platform none other than youtube. It's a pleasure to read these comments with so many insights and good questions. Your channel is like a microverse of curiosity, such a lovely place.
Hehe, butts.
But no in all seriousness I absolutely agree, wonderful channel and a wonderful mature insightful community! :-)
Exposure to an area of bread to determine how well it inhibits mold growth.
Fantastic idea!
The bread will be toast :-)
@@AppliedScience Anyone have samples of Chernobyl mold? The stuff that photosynthesizes gammas? Maybe it will grow, under e-beam. (Like the infamous Strain 121, thermophiles from the Black Smokers, use an autoclave for proper growth environment.) Hey, how can melanin stop gammas, when lead does not? I've heard rumors of using melanin for radiation shielding.
If you shoot anhydrous ammonia with it, can you dissolve the electrons in it and see a color change as they become solvated?
Very clever idea! I actually know the guys who published the initial paper about solvated electrons in the anhydrous ammonia. I'll let them know!
It's not that clever, assuming you're into a Birch reductions and whatnot...
And who needs solvated electrons anyways? Walter White uses em lol haha rofl
... but if there is any worthwhile knowledge acquired from immersing all in NH3, then bombardment via electron, it's to prove the idea that the blue color observed when the lithium hits the NH3 really is free electrons in solution, and not some other hitherto-undisclosed phenomena
What about charge balance? You'd have no counter cation. I'm guessing it would just build up a static charge and stop long before any color can be seen.
I was also reminded of the solvated electrons. Lol I was curious if you were to try to measure the voltage of it, what would happen if anything?
Stick something under it and put your XRF detector next to it!
Since you're firing electrons at something, you can get characteristic x-ray peaks out of it, just like you would with any regular x-ray tube.
This is just how SEMs do it!
That's a good idea!
@Matthew Morycinski You're not going to get anywhere near the beam current when it goes through the atmosphere, and definitely nowhere near the Gaussian profile. I wouldn't expect the actual electron "current" to be more than 10% of the beam current. Even still, at 30keV 200uA you're not likely to do any significant damage if you run it for a minute or two while standing a meter or more away.
@@Spirit532 I guess dangerous is not the beam itself, but radiation from electrons hitting whole area of aluminum plate. Characteristic x-ray K-alpha emmision line of Aluminum is 1.48keV (~0.85nm) and I'm not sure how much of it can be stopped by thin glass tube and air. EDIT: I forgot about bremsstrahlung that has wide spectrum.
@@pavelperina7629 1.48keV would be stopped by a few mm of air. Braking radiation is more dangerous, but still, as said above, the amount would be negligible.
@@Spirit532 I'm not sure where to find information about xray opacity for various energies and materials, but someone told me that using aluminum and steel for shielding makes huge difference and that's why all SEM parts are from steel or iron and beam energy is limited to 30keV
I love how you show your process and explain why you do it that way. One day I hope to start a kind of lab of my own, and I love seeing all the different ways people use tools for various purposes. Thanks for the good content!
Humble improvement to previous comments:
1. Mist of fluorescent dye (e.g. zyglow). might need to dilute w/ alcohol. Mist w/ ultrasound.
2. Instead of bread, a standard test is agar in a petri dish. Touch with dirty fingers. Cover with plastic wrap (only 12 um thick). Sterilize!
Thanks for another amazing video.
Great stuff Ben! Any thoughts on adding beam forming plates or (A focus electrode) inside the device to focus the beam?
no
Mr Carlson ! Love your stuff too
Thanks! Yes, good point. I've seen a lot of X-ray tubes just have a cup shaped reflector around the filament to help shape the beam. The cup is usually just electrically connected to the filament, so no special drive voltage needed. I also tried to find out why X-ray tubes never seem to have enhanced (eg barium) emitters like all common vacuum tubes. As near as I can tell, the problem is the high voltage electron impact on the metal target will create ions that are accelerated back toward the cathode, and would eventually destroy it. This is partially (or completely?) why early CRTs had ion traps in their electron guns? Maybe you know?
@@AppliedScience I haven't seen enhanced emitters in sealed tubes, aside from thoriated tungsten(embedded, not coated), but actively pumped lab tubes(micro/nanofocus) often have coated cathodes, which are replaceable.
The cup is still the same Wehnelt that is in your SEM and such. Serves the same function, to pinch the beam.
this is awesome.. while watching the video I was thinking how much Mr Carlson would probably like it
Would love to see you expose a micro SD card to the beam (or some other array type device), I wonder if you could attempt to make a cool but completely useless image sensor out of it (although I suspect the wear leveling to be a problem on modern ones).
Connecting a metal plate to an analog ammeter and to ground and moving it around in the beam would also be a really simple but cool demo.
I also wonder if considering this thing is putting out a good watt or two of radiation (might have to crank it up a little for this work) I wonder if you could put the aerogel (or some other low thermal conductivity material) into the beam and then cross section it while filming with a thermal camera, I would expect to see an interesting pattern as the beam is absorbed by the material heating it.
I also see a lot of people are suggesting a cloud chamber, I would love to see that as I don't really know what kind of trails this thing would make.
Just a NAND memory chip would be a better "ghetto image sensor" - assuming the electrons can make it through the packaging. MicroSDs would have the same exact issue though.
@@ГуглГовно-м7н nobody in the ghetto is making imaging sensors
Very interesting experiment is when the chunk of plexiglass (acrilyc glass) exposed to electrons with energy about 5MeV. Electrons stucks in plastic and then when you pin it through with some grounded sharp thing, electrons are drain through this thing to ground and you get a little lightning inside that draws a 3D Lichtenberg figures.
UPD: Oh! There is in video about it. )
@@JesseCombsTwiZtedCheese that depends of what the ghetto!)))
@@ГуглГовно-м7н you can sand the packaging and the die itself if that wold help. It's called die lapping in extreme overclocking. They sand it thinner and mainly flatter for better thermal transfer.
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.
I swear when Ben walks into a room the collective IQ doubles.
Impossible unless the room started with jjust people whose IQ's added up equaled Ben's
an EPROM chip could be interesting, while constantly reading it to see if the bits just get erased (like with UV) or get wildly flipped around because of the electrons
A hot dog would make a great finger analog.
we've got a winner here. chuck up the hot dog in the lathe and use the cross feed to evenly blast the entire surface with electrons. Or channel the ghost of Grant Thompson and cross-link some gummy bears.
Im not really informed about it here, but my assuption would be that there wouldn't be any visible damage, but more like it would cause cancer/irradiate and kill all the cells.
@@Douglas.KennedyFTFY we've got a wiener here.
Or a finger!
So he should put his wiener there?
Wow! This channel deserve 10 million subscribers, I subscribed many science channels but no one is even close to this guy in coolness.
Respect from india 🇮🇳
Could you post-accelerate the electrons after they come through the window?
Yes.
Should be possible in principle. You would have to be fighting the air a lot though. The beam is also crazy divergent since the electrons strongly repel each other, so collimation will be another issue to work out.
Scattering would be a problem (as you can see from the way the beam spreads out from the end of the tube, obviously more than how much it spreads out going down the tube.
only theoretical.
thats why we build all that stuff in vacuum. air ruins everything.
Field strength in air is limited. Especially when ionizing particles are present. Nice idea though, use the electron beam to trigger sparks or make air conductive without sparks perhaps.
It'd be interesting to see its effect on a living thing - maybe part of a plant, or an agar plate with bacteria? I'm assuming it'd kill / sterilise the affected region very quickly.
That's a good idea. Since I mentioned it's used to sterilize equipment, I should show it working!
@@AppliedScience maybe draw your logo with the beem in the petri dish lol. Btw unless I misheard you the e beam x links the extruded heatshrink tubing before it's expanded. That's what gives it a way to relax to its original size when you reheat it in use. You can over irradiate it in processing and make it brittle.
As always, some of the absolute coolest stuff and best production on youtube. Thanks so much for the effort.
Try the Double-slit experiment
"So if you have time in the Large Hadron Collider.." 😂😂
on it, as in riding the drivers seat in the topside control room, not inside getting irradiated.
Yeah. I'll just call for an appointment.
Well, that's actually hurling protons around. What you really want is time on SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), which is a two-mile long electron gun.
When I was little learning about science and I tried to build a laser with a flashlight, cardboard tube, and tinfoil. Ben is what my child mind thought I could do, go into the garage and build that crazy thing. Keep being awesome.
My father used to work in air traffic control for the RAF, I remember as a youngster (1960's) visiting him at work and seeing a small room full of CRT's all without phosphored screens. When a call sent by an aircraft it was received by multiple stations each remotely controlling a CRT, the beams projected across the room onto a large (presumably phosphored) screen to auto-triangulate the aircraft location. Hope my memory stands the test of time.
I don't know of any other channels that do what you do. You have underrated videos.
Ben is one of a kind, but you can check out tech ingridients, thought emporium, cody's lab. Action lab doesn't usually do these long projects, but has many small but amazing physics experiments.
no one has a setup like this guy
Science is not for everyone!!!
Do you (or anyone else) have recs for similar channels with applied physics experiments?
Sure! ua-cam.com/users/SamZeloofvideos ua-cam.com/users/xofunkox ua-cam.com/users/florencefst ua-cam.com/users/phywesystemevideos ua-cam.com/users/tuopeek1videos ua-cam.com/users/nylesteinervideos ua-cam.com/users/CarlWillis1980videos
@@AppliedScience legend
🙏
@@AppliedScience Why have I never thought to ask you this before
There is a really great experiment that can be used to measure the beam energy from a particle accelerator. You place a block of clear acrylic in front of the accelerator and fire electrons into it - the rule of thumb that I had been told was that 10mm of penetration equated to 1MeV of energy. The acrylic block is such a good insulator that once the electrons have pernitrated it they can't escape and are trapped. Once you are at this stage you place the acrylic block on a hard surface and using a 'center punch' and a hammer you apply a shock in a very concentrated point. The shock wave that travels through the acrylic block dislodges the trapped electrons and they come rushing out. There is a very bright flash of light and the electrons come out with so much force that the structure of the acrylic block gets ripped apart (at a very minute scale). The resultant 'damage' in the acrylic block looks like a tree like structure with a central trunk (where the center punch was) and the trunk separates into smaller and smaller branches. You can then simple measure how high the 'tree' is to be able to work out the beam energy.
Wintergreen mints? Is there enough energy to light up something triboluminescent.
Yes, I know - completely different unrelated process. That's why I'm curious.
I thought of the life savers, haha, but that requires crushing . . would they react anyway?🤔
@@rogerscottcathey Triboluminescence.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence
I think this is the best science channel on UA-cam. The amount of knowledge this guy has is insane
6:49 "Is this thing producing x-rays?" "Yeah you betcha!" lol you're great!
I wonder how long will the video last before youtube takes it down
@@great__success no use in wondering about something that is not going to happen
Last time he said X-Rays on YT, the neighbour sent the police over.
I asked, for sure. When I saw the thumbnail I remembered one of my brilliant electronics expert uncles would say that you can play with the fly back voltages from a b&w TV, but by color the 20,000 volts puts you in the danger zone enough to matter.
At work we have 3 of these machines that crosslink polymers in plastic. Specs are: 200KV, up to 460 mA. 48" beam width. Typically runs absorbed dose of about 5.0 MR. Filaments run 13.5 Volts. The window is 2 micron titanium foil, in front of a copper foil backing ( water cooled to absorb heat) Vacuum is 6.2x10-7 Torr, generated by 10" CryoTorr cryopump. Thank goodness for interlocks.
Some ideas to try:
1. Put a hard metal in the beam and measure the increase of X-rays.
2. See what happens if you put a leaf foil in the beam path.
3. Epoxy a glass tube on the other side and see what happens with various gases at very low pressures (neon, Argon, CO2. also try a magnet or electromagnet coil to see if it deflects the beam. At much lower pressures you should be able to get the beam to travel further.
4. Make a tiny CRT tube instead of using the electron window, use a flat bottom closed tube or small erlenmeyer flask with the bottom coated with a phosphor & magnetic yokes to control the beam path.
About X-ray, you can get energy and convert it to wavelength using for example the following table www.jeolusa.com/DesktopModules/LiveContent/API/Image/Get?mid=4725&eid=1&Type=View&PortalId=2
But I don't know what the is efficiency is depending on beam energy and material. My experience is that with beam energy of 30keV (which is limit of SEMs due to safety restrictions) x-ray detector barely detects anything above 10keV and there's nothing above 18keV.
Graphene also makes an excellent vacuum barrier. Today, the sheets have less defects and you could stack up 5 and they would still only be ~ 15A thick. So, you get a lot less attenuation than through the silicon nitride.
The nitride windows have also been used in SEM imaging for in-situ liquid environmental cells. Cultures are grown inside at ~atmosphere. You need to have a BSE detector and the cell cultures must be growing on the inside surface of the nitride membrane. You must also be careful not to focus the beam at too high a current and rupture the window. Which is likely what happened when you arced your source.
If you coated the graphene with metal, you would produce a source of x-rays where the beam strikes the metal. Then you would only need a camera behind the target object.
This simple x-ray tomography setup was made for inside SEMs by Gatan and Bruker. But nobody sells them today. Not enough demand. But they worked. You could make a simple version. I have considered revising the product.
www.bruker.com/fileadmin/user_upload/8-PDF-Docs/X-rayDiffraction_ElementalAnalysis/Microanalysis_EBSD/Flyers/Fly_micro_CT_en_rev1_3_lowres.pdf
The resolution is improved if you keep the metal foil closer to the focused beam and keep the target close to the x-ray source. But the concept is pretty straight forward.
You can use you window with a metal costing as well, to produce the x-rays.
Then put your thin low density target object (the x-rays must be able to penetrate) behind the x-rays source and capture images with a suitable camera. Rotate the object while taking images and create tomograms. There is open source python scripts for creating the 3D tomography.
Similar membrane apertures have been used to make an “airSEM”. This is an odd company out of Israel and the product is b-nano. It works. Cornell has one. Niche market.
www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1431927613004133
I have also done micro photogrammetry in the SEM. Which is very cool! I did a few presentations and tutorials on that. You could do that now with your SEM using the simple auxiliary rotation stage. Just like with the drill bit. Except each rotated image becomes input for the 3D object model.
We have a 1 MeV electron beam at work for cross-linking of cable insulations, some of which go into nuclear power plants. For more common applications there are cheaper ways of cross-linking plastics. The irradiation happens in a concrete bunker due to the safety aspects of the emitted radiation. Unfortunately I have not got to play with it too much... which is probably a good thing :)
Correction of how the heat shrink works:
You first manufacture the tube in its final shrunk size and then cross-link it. If you then heat it above its melting point it will not become liquid, but it is instead a "rubber" which you can stretch it by a lot. Cooling it in its stretched state will cause it to freeze in place, and it will only go back after heating above its melting point at a later stage. This is extra apparent if you use transparent heat shrinks (for example PTFE) as they are often milky at ambient temperature due to the crystals in the plastic, but at the temperature when it starts to shrink it usually turns transparent as the crystals melt.
(Note: PTFE does not work well with electron beam crosslinking as it degrades (does not like radiation), but luckily it behaves as a cross-linked material already from the start due to the high amounts of chain-entanglements)
@Richard_Andersson have you encountered the early history? Arno B., trying to fall off an Alp? (His co-author was killed.) Capacitron in 1951 Popular Mechanics, in Life mag 1947. Also Lawrence and his Megavolt, publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5s200764&chunk.id=d0e2505&toc.depth=1
ALso see worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/SI-1928-06.pdf , Brasch tries to harness storm cloud as MV supply for atom-smashers.
Decapsulate a mosfet apply a bit of Vgs while in beam, stop the beam -> measure Vgs/Id at several steps, you will measure the shift of the Vth. With the same method you can measure the energy deposited in SiO2 in Gy (if the mosfet Vth variation wtr to Dose has been previously calibrated ) As usual, great work and great content. Cheers from CERN
Awesome video as always!
One idea for another experiment: you could install a few solenoids in front of the cathode with incrementally increased B field to focus the beam to a tighter point. This could reduce the amount of wasted electrons that hit the anode and send more through the window. (I'm not sure if this vacuum tube is big enough for the number of windings and length needed, but I could run a quick simulation in Comsol if it seems like an idea worth trying.)
Magnetic lenses are incredibly difficult to control, they require a complex geometry of the core, that is why electrons are focused by electric fields much easier to create and control in CRTs and X-ray tubes, so this should be made inside the vacuum side, but it would fry the Lenard window. T he magnetic control is only used for the scan in CRTs for TVs and is electrostatic in CRTs for oscilloscopes because the TV screen is much larger, has a weird geometry and it is a pain in the ass to adjust, so most of the adjustment is made electrostatically. In electron microscopes most of the control is made by magnets several of them.
Your channel is great, subscribed. It's fun and educational, and that's what I like.
Years ago, I found an big old school building, that I wanted to buy and live in. It's 13,000 sq. ft. As I was daydreaming about living there, I wondered how I would heat it. I'm into "alternative" stuff, as it was in those days. I finally realized I needed a small, intense heat source year-round, to run a generator and heat water, so I came up with my own design for a fusion reactor, using a collimated electron beam aimed down the axis of a cylinder. By my "best estimation" (lol) it would take 90% of its output to keep itself going. But I thought, WTH, all I need is some deuterium and tritium. It's probably a good thing I don't have a shop or access to power tools.
Keep making awesome videos, thanks.
I'd be curious about giving atoms some extra electrons. Like what happens if you take a chunk of sodium, shoot it with this, then throw it in water? Will it be "supercharged" with even more electrons than usual, and release more energy when you activate it?
Another idea: stick Styrofoam peanuts to something with static electricity (maybe the lid to a plastic tote container) and see if this thing can knock the peanuts off.
Would this travel farther in helium/hydrogen due to lower density? That would be cool to see.
What happens if you take a second tube with a second window at one end, phosphor at the other end, and vacuum inside? Can you put window to window, with a gap of 5mm or something, such that it traverses air, then goes back into vacuum, and then can travel another 10cm before striking phosphor to make a spot? That would be neat, transferring electrons from one vacuum chamber to another, across an air gap.
Since sodium is conductive, all of the charge would be located on the surface of the chunk and I think it would discharge as soon as it touched another material (even non-conductive, like the thing you're holding it with or water). Highly charged metals even emit electrons into the air, so I think there would be no difference between throwing sodium in water with and without exposing it to the beam first.
I work in the wire fabrication domain and yes, we do use electron beam accelerators to modify the molecular structure of the insulation material. We use Polyethylene in those types of wire. As for the benefits are as follow: higher current capacity (as the insulation is more resilient to heat) , they do not catch fire(they just turn black, but they do not flame out) and if they are burned by an external source they are more environmentally friendly. Our machine is only 800keV in power but I found out that it’s almost at the top of the power, or it was when fabricated, for this kind of machines. The OEM is Vivirad France, and great safety measures were taken by the oem and our facility to prevent irradiation of the personal. (Mainly x rays, but there are also gamma and betta radiations emited by the various materials struck by the electrons)
Woah! Have you made a cloud chamber yet? Might be an interesting target.
A good source of electrons are the filaments and surrounding tube from old style electron tubes,they are coated in thorium.
Heh, "Aperture Science" Now you're thinking with portals!.
He does what he must, because he can.
But but will there be cake...
@@krap101 Oh, yes of course. The cake is very delicious and moist. Most of all, the cake is real and not fake.
- Shoot some flames with electrons!
- Try to charge metal items and see if you get a discharge from it OR charge non-conductive items and see if they repel each other
- Try to make oil fly or move around
Super interesting video as usual!
The patent for the flame rectification amplifier was issued
Feb. 10, 1948, H. S. JONES 2,435,940
SAFETY CONTROL SYSTEM FOR FUEL BURNERS
Original Filed July 29, l94l
500+ vac on a flame rod will pass a micro-amp pulsed D.C.through the flame.
This is a flame detection circuit common in gas burners.
Can this be used to generate electride salts by just blasting an aqueous solution of some relatively electropositive salt/salts or something of the sort? Could be very useful to obtain an aggressive reductive agent without the need for special precursors.
The process of making Lichtenberg figures in clear acrylic is quite an experience - the flash of light and audible noise when you shock the acrylic with a sharp pointed center punch is quite impressive. The process works well when you have a few MeV - the rule of thumb I was told is that 1MeV produces about 5mm of penetration in the acrylic.
It seems like the obvious thing to put in front of it would be a cloud chamber.
one chaotic chamber
some time ago we played with a laser conduit to project plasma charge through the atmosphere quite a distance. rather than getting into the nitty gritty, here is the nuts and bolts of it.
take a disc of some diameter. mount some Fabry Perot laser diodes around its perimeter facing toward the centre. grab some sort reflective medium , glass, diffraction grating or what ever to project the laser out perpendicular to the plate, just off centre.a small hole dead centre over the top of the electron window will suffice. mount all of this on some bearings with a few slip rings and spin it up. a stable laser conduit. obviously there are a few more niceties with collimating lenses on the disc but you get the idea
the ultimate effect is, the air within the conduit becomes partially ionised allowing a far more conductive path for what ever charge you shove up its nose.
The electrons only have 25kev kinetic energy, so the highest charge they can give the acrylic is 25kv. This is not sufficient to cause much (any?) dielectric breakdown.
I don't think that's how it works. You have to think of the electrons like bullets penetrating into ballistic gel. For a given eV (ie. velocity) they are all going to pile up at the same location inside the material (at the Bragg peak) and get stuck there bc it's an insulator. The voltage gradient across the acrylic is then going to be a function of the number of electrons trapped inside, which itself is going to be dictated by the electron beam luminosity and beam exposure time rather than the electron energy. The electrons just pile up inside the insulator until the dielectric breakdown gradient is exceeded and a little lighting bolt finally spontaneously forms through it equalizing the voltage difference.
The speed of the electrons would determine how deeply in the material they can embed, or if they are repelled by the existing built-up charge in the material. But the charge on each electron is always the same, so getting a certain number of electrons into the center of the plastic should always have the same effect upon discharging them. As far as I know.
@@AppliedScience I don't know if electrons create positive or negative charge. You are adding some electrons, but at the same time they are causing emission of secondary electrons. Have you tried to measure current between sample and ground in your SEM?
Speaking about SEM, way why not to use tungsten cathode and Wehnelt cylinder instead of light bulb?
You could try exposing a pc of pp or pe plastic to see if you could activate it enough to get glue to bond to it or fool around with the accudyne test pens to measure any change.
You really overestimate the capabilities of the rest of us here, “one other trick if you decide to do this, the aperture has...” 😄😄
literal Aperture Science
@@monad_tcp Note the common availability of the apertures that the fictional "Aperture Science" actually specialized in.
@Evi1M4chine That's why a large part of success is circumstance and luck. Hard work is the only multiplier you have any control over.
At 5:41, hence no one is near a 1MeV TEM checking to see if the column has been assembled correctly and not leaking X-rays LOL. As always you videos are great. Did you use your SEM HT for the 25Kv?
I'm really wondering why they made these square instead of circular (Talking bout the window, not the whole structure), i bet the stress reduction by doing that would make posible to manufacture these even thinner
Good observation, I would guess they are utilizing the semiconductor manufacturing processes already in use .
Yeah, probably because it's made in a wafer form that's then cut into squares.
@@AtlasReburdened i meant the small window, not the whole structure that it comes in, as Jack Allen mentioned it could very weel be due to the process used to make them
Hard (really hard) to make a round scribe or round cut in thin fragile material. Even making a square window in the SiN seems pretty hard to accomplish. But they did it. Perhaps laser cut???
@@gcr100 Oh, I wasn't aware that the window and it's 'frame' were a single piece. I guess that makes more sense though. That is interesting. I recall learning once that some echants used in simiconductor manufacture behave quite differently depending on the orientation of the atomic level crystalline structure so it may be that the cubic form of Silicon nitride is used, and is cut such that it's orientation permits the echant to preferentially 'eat away' in one direction which, given the cubic structure, would likely mean that a square window could be made with fewer flaws than one of any other shape. Just an educated guess though.
Gee... this really brought me into my PhD years. I remember we bought a bunch of those and I was trying to sputter deposit some amorphous material onto them and watch it crystallize in situ in TEM (every time I took them out of the sputterer I found them exploded). I almost was shocked when you mentioned that they can hold vacuum, since I remember how fragile they were (but at least the plasma thing in the beginning of the vid made me calm again). Amazing work, though, Ben! Huge fan of your channel!
sweet. homebrew quantum physics here we come!
I’ve been watching your videos for a few years and I’m always waiting for the next one. Thank you for sharing this with us.
"I've got some home made aerogel" ... As you do.
I wonder if Aerogel stops the beam more than air?
Being in lock down, I've probably spent to much time on YT.
That being so, I've just 'discovered' your postings.
Your range of science knowledge, its explanation and its application is magnificent. you are a polymath!
Being a bit weird, I have a utopian dream.
40% Polymath, 30% Farmers, 25% Artisans, 5% Entertainers, and
0.000000000000000000000000000000001% Politicians.
Keep up the good work, I now have a favorite YT channel.
"Other than my finger" That hadn't even occurred to me. What would happen if something organic got close to that? Can you try this on like a hot dog or something?
a bit of cancer, that's what, i.e. dna damage
Analogous to thermal damage. So, you'd receive a burn.
But not just on the surface.
I’d love to see you place a diamond in the electron beam. In my line of work I frequently place diamond samples into a scanning electron microscope to examine their luminescence to the electron beam and it would be really interesting to see how it would react in air.
Me, through most of the video: "Stick your finger in it!" Me, at end of video: "awwww". Nice work, as usual, I really enjoy your videos.
You are so awesome you have people viewing your videos have no context...
And then you have 90% of us who think they know what you're talking about...
It's like having a nephew that's a lab teacher.
And we can hate you because you are nephew....
God I love this channel
But how come we know the emitted light is Photon or electron?
An electron beam will be deflected by magnets. Photons won't.
I just finished watching your video on the laser diode that measures velocity, distance, cuts cooks and bakes
I would really like to see you bend the beam with a magnetic field
And that's how you make a synchrotron radiation
You could arrange 2 electrodes, each with one hole, in such a way that the beam passes through the first electrode and then through the second one. Then apply high voltage across the electrodes and you can observe how long electric arc can you create.
"Eventually, you just run out of atoms..." Pop by my place, I'll let you have a mole or two of whatever you need.
Gold, please.
I'll take a mole of your finest oganesson, please.
@@Asdayasman Thanks, nearly screwed up and picked Palladium.
Gold sells for ~$63 per Gram and there is 197.0 g in a mole of Gold - Gold costs ~$12,411 per mole.
Palladium sells for ~$78.37 per Gram and there is 106.42 g in a mole of Palladium - Palladium costs ~$8,340 per mole.
@@itsevilbert m8 why are you assuming I have enough brain cells to rub together? I just picked something shiny.
I love how you show how safe it is to irradiation is when sterilization is needed. Most of the time people freak out that their food is irradiated and they think they might get sick from it, when in reality it's safer being irradiated.
My dad was a physicist who designed field emission systems. In particular, he designed field emitter arrays for several systems. The big machine looked like a locomotive. It used a Marx surge pulse generator to generate high voltage at high current. It was charged at 8.6 kV and discharged at 2.5 MV. The pulse duration was in the 4 nS range. The pulse was directed into a cold cathode tube, which generated the electron beam. The device was used to x-ray bomb blasts in the desert, simulate atomic blasts, and radiation-harden semiconductors. If you were standing beside the unit, not in front, there was enough scattered radiation from one pulse to kill you.
cool
Hermes, izzat you?
I saw a great announcement from Project Hermes: they could repair it so very rapidly, that they could now fire over five pulses in a single week!
The bulb filament is probably an underperformer as an electron emitter. One could always try the filament of a vacuum valve/tube which is made of tungsten with a BaO (barium oxide) coating.
Film. Put a peace of 35mm film and let see what we can go through with electrons !
A sheet of photo paper, wetted with developer, would yield almost immediate results :)
Electron beam recorders were used in the 1960s to 1980s to transfer video to film.
You'd have to figure out how to filter out the x rays.
@@whitcwa We used electron beams to write on 16mm microfilm in 1973. The film was 3 feet away from the emmiter.
Get an old cam w/fairly large CCD, then paint it with zinc sulfide paint. (DIY dental x-ray sensor.)
Old reactor plants on US navy ships can see cobalt-60 levels on the order of whole curies in some valves. Thankfully, we know where those valves are and can set up temporary lead shielding in the reactor compartment to reduce exposure. Attempts to reduce cobalt containing parts are being made, but those alloys are far superior to alternatives.
The worst culprits are the control rod mechanisms, which must be as wear resistant as possible and as such are made of cobalt alloys. The cobalt-59 corrodes into the coolant and is activated by the neutron flux of the core. Later, it and other corrosion solids settle in valve bodies and low flow piping, causing hot spots.
Applied Science: "Coolest thing I've seen in a long time"
Me: "Most amazing thing I've seen ever"
Great video! You should try chilling the pink-calcite below 0c, then irradiate it, then watch it as it warms up to room temp. It will display thermoluminesence as it warms. I've made a few Lichtenberg figures on medical linacs, usually ones that are about to be removed. I've wanted to try pink calcite but haven't purchased any yet.
COOL!
Thanks for the interesting video! Just wanted to mention that very thin transparent windows are also used in EUV photolithography for pellicles that prevent contamination of the photomask. EUV pellicles are less than 50nm thin.
Would you do a video related to the Diamond base batteries that use radioactivity to generate electricity?
Soak some meat in a phosphorescent liquid then expose it to the beam to visualise penetration depth.
@@busimagen Good point, although now that I think about it the advantage of this equipment is seeing the effect of beta rays at atmospheric pressure, could just put a steak in a vacuum chamber to do what I'm talking about :P
hmmm... what about double split experiment with those electrons you shoot? Haven't you tried it? add a partition with two splits
Things to put in front of the beam other than your finger: Your toe.
Nice try.
@@AppliedScience The other finger that you didn't specify!
I was going to suggest his eyeballs, but I thought it was too evil and refrained from commenting.
Someone else's finger??
@@zebo-the-fat I'd volunteer my finger if I hadn't already pledged it to Korone.
I'd seen that gopro video you mentioned before and was wondering what the dopant in those pieces of calcite were, now I know. Thanks for including that!
I used to be a high vacuum service engineer. I once serviced a vacuum pump for a high output x-ray gun inside of a concrete bunker used to crosslink plastic from a roll in a continuous process. It was one of the coolest service calls I had.
I used to work in a plant that made shrink film. One product line (LTF) was scanned with X-rays before the tube was blown out in the bubble tower to full size and cut into two flat panels for winding. The X-rays were meant to crosslink the molecules of the plastic to strengthen the film across the web, since the extrusion of the tube already laid the molecules out straight. One year, during Christmas shutdown, the X-ray generator wasn't shut off, while the cooling system was. The X-ray tube and the power supply that drove it were both destroyed. The vacuum pump also had to be replaced because it had been sucking water from the cooling system. I believe that system used a very large turbomolecular pump because it was held at such a deep vacuum. While the line was down for X-ray repair, we replaced the thin Titanium aperture sheet on the scanner output. It was crazy to see how damaged it was from the beam. I don't know how thick it was, but it was ridiculously sharp on the edges so I was wearing two Kevlar/Stainless Steel weave gloves to protect my hands during install.
Love it!!
I used to service vacuum systems. I was called out to helium leak detect a vacuum system which maintained a high vacuum for an powerful x ray gun used to crosslink rubber in a continuous sheet. The x ray gun was inside a concrete bunker with very thick walls, the rubber belt would enter and exit through slots in the walls which were zig-zagged. When I was inside the room leak checking the system it was eerie knowing if they turned on the x-ray gun it was all over for me - like getting thousands of body x-rays all at once. There were of course multiple interlocks to prevent this such as a switch inside the room which prevents the x-ray gun from being switched on.
The cross-linking of PVC-wire insulation does not make it more flame resistant. The PVC gets mixed with Mg(OH)2 and when this heats up it reacts to MgO and water. The water then weakens the fire. The problem is, that just mixing Mg(OH)2 into the polymer makes it really brittle and basically unusable for insulation. The cross linking happens between the polymer and the Mg(OH)2 and makes it less brittle so it can be used in applications where elasticity is necessary again. If I remember correctly, the final product also surprisingly gets pink-ish.
Another cool application is cross-linking a regular thermoplastic polymer after it was brought into its final shape. If you for example cross-link a plastic cup, you can heat it up above the glass transition temperature and deform it pretty severly (as it is typical for thermoplastics above their glass transition temperature). The deformed state will stay after cooling. If you heat the deformed cup up above its glass transition temperature again, the molecules can move more freely and go back to their original shap, the undeformed cup. It's almost like a shape-memory effect.
Edit: In retrospect, that's probably the same procedure as with the heat shrink tubing.
At 07:00 you talk about the aluminum electrode "producing" less powerful X-rays than if it would be out of tungsten (or a harder metal in general). Could you elaborate why this is?
Google "characteristic xray" for explanation and "
Energy table for EDS analysis" for energies of xray photons. It's not completely true that heavier atom emits higher energy because it never emits photons of higher energy than electron, but heavier atoms have more spectral lines. And characteristic xray is only part of emitted xrays.
You can cut the neck off of an old television picture tube and use the high voltage section from the same TV with a push-pull DC/DC converter and a new primary coil wound on the flyback transformer.. I did that as an attempt at a high school science project but never had a means of drawing down a good vacuum or a good window. Thanks for the heads-up on the epoxy resin!
For Lichtenberg figures you might try putting the whole apparatus in vacuum and skipping the window? You could go to a higher acceleration potential (with appropriate shielding) and would not deal with losses to the air. On my list of things to experiment with for sure.
You are officially my favourite UA-cam experimenter.. amazing work.
It would be very interesting to see the results of Millikan's oil drop. Another idea would be to irritate yeast or a biologic item that would be effected. Would be a great example of electrons power.
Im a mechanic electric science physics chemistry and biology knowledge lover!
Im realy enjoying your channel, therefore my subscribe to it.
What I love the most about it, is how you explain the things in a way which is very comfortable for the listener to understand.
You don't leave anything out. You guide us into the whole proces perfectly!
My respects bro! I salute you :) Just Keep it coming! AND Don't you stop being awesome!
My greetings from the Netherlands ;)
Interesting video. I worked in a manufacturing organization that used E-beam technology to irradiate materials. Most of our vaults ran at 1MEV. Occasionally we would break a window and it was quite explosive.
I love it when extremely intelligent people are able to dumb down incredibly complex topics to a level that I understand.
Chased a turbomolecullar vacuum pump for a few years on Ebay.. and it was way beyond my range $$$. it have to be really awesome to have one!! Never the less that is literally awesome video, and it actually expand one's knowledge.. specially about cancer radiation treatment....
Why couldn't a window 10x thicker dissipate 10x more heat? Is most of the heat being conducted to the air on the outer surface instead of conducting to the solid structure?
My suggestion: decap various ICs (ram, microcontrollers, basic 74 series logic) etc., and throw them in from of the electron beam while they're running. It would be cool to see what's required to change their state or crash them. Excellent video!
put camera in beam various angles? congrats on another amazing video the range and depth of your knowledge is truly inspiring.
Probably not the most practical but you might be able to use the portable XRF gun detector to detect the X-rays given off when the electrons strike a target/material. Basically the same as EDS in an SEM. More surface sensitive than XRF.
Is the Calcite video linked? Cheers!! Maybe is that the silicon nitride I will check now.