Fusion Message Board

In this space, visitors are invited to post any comments, questions, or skeptical observations about Philo T. Farnsworth's contributions to the field of Nuclear Fusion research.

Subject: Re: Fusion detection
Date: Dec 25, 3:32 pm
Poster: Tom Ligon

On Dec 25, 3:32 pm, Tom Ligon wrote:

>One neat way to check for fusion is to set up a plastic block infront of a cloud chamber and check for the heavy proton tracks. Fast neuts in dense plastic create a lot of protons recoiling from nuclear encounters with the hydrogen. Scott Little on this list did this to just check his neutron counter!
>

Richard,

Since protons are charged particles, I would be surprised if they could penetrate very far thru most solid materials, especially chamber walls. But by the same token I would also expect they could be stopped more efficiently by a scintillation plastic, and that could give something like 100x more sensitivity than BiCron 720 does. And since the energy of D-D protons is up in the same general 3 MeV range as the neutrons, I'd expect a similarly unambiguous flash.

A scintillator of this type was described to me last week, but I haven't had time to look it up. We were thinking we would put it in the chamber rather than trying to count stuff coming thru the walls.

You could also charge up a plate or Faraday cup detector to repel slow ions (+ a few kV), and magnetically screen it to deflect electrons (easy to deflect but strongly attracted to the detector), then detect high energy charged particles electronically. With an electron multiplier you could count them individually.

Tom