A superb posting! Good info and good thoughts too! I will be rivieted to this board and anxiously await any result of your efforts which is sort working from "the other end of things" compared to my neutron detection efforts.
It will be great to have some proton related info in the future to show off.
As you note and I have pressed home in the past, neutron measurement is an art! The Zambelli visit allowed me to check out the possibility of slow or epithermal neutrons coming form the fusor. I found none. Still, without a true neutron spectrometer $$$$$$$$ the energies could only be said to be fast, based on my naked/moderated BF3 counter results.
One way to place the proton detector to avoid the needle like, hot electron beams, would be to align the inner grid in such a manner that a line-of-site path from the center of the drift tube opening,at the shell, is intersected by a grid wire "shadow" from the reaction zone.
I have been at this a while and align my view port accordingly now to avoid damaging the borosilicate window in fusor III. It works! The E-beams are deadly and symmetrically centered over the geodesic grid openings. A relativley quiet or dead zone exists over the grid wires.
A magnet is a great idea to use around the drift tube to turn the electrons. Place the magnet across the drift tube and use an iron or steel donut plate over the tube between the magnet and the fusor shell to avoid magnetic interference within the fusor chamber itself.
Again, feed us data as you work this system up.
Richard Hull
Created on Friday, January 05, 2001 10:35 AM EDT by Richard Hull