Science/Engineering/Technical forums

My curves have been pretty quiet lately, and the sun has been pretty inactive. Maybe I have to wait until our solar system drifts through some more wrinkles in space-time. : ) My experiment is far from perfect; I basically attacked problems serially, a bit like "Whack a Mole." I'm always afraid to ...

I've got a fairly stable system running, waiting for the sun to do something. I should be able to see something more convincing, if a big flare ever again occurs. I wonder if I've created a solar flare suppressor.

I have a fairly reliable plot of the ionization chamber online at http://www.techlib ...

I connected up an identical chamber and unsoldered the wire, using its springiness to push it back against the connection. After it settled and was jumping around a little, I reached in with a plastic tool and carefully pushed the wire away, disconnecting the chamber from the amplifier. The reading ...

I found an estimate of the expected current in an ionization chamber from cosmic sources in Nuclear Radiation Detection and the author estimates 4.3 x 10-19/cm^3 and up to four times that from terrestrial sources, if no lead shield is used. That would be 0.2 fA and 0.8 fA in my chamber, not to ...

Coming at the calculation from another direction, I get about 200 fA p-p for that diurnal variation. That's way too much, unless your "multiplier" effect is happening. That would be a surprising discovery, too. Alphas really plow the field, so triggering one with a muon or gamma would give gain in ...

It looks like I'm getting about 350 pA from the chamber. That would mean that I need a variation on the order of 100 fA to cause that sine wave. I don't even get 50 fA, total, due to background radiation from my huge cookie tin chamber, so I can't imagine the little one giving more than one or two ...

Well, it didn't even occur to me that it was the background radiation! I'll be surprised if the background variation adds up to 0.05%, but that is a straightforward explanation. The chamber is a small almond tin and it has two smoke detector elements inside, so I imagined the background is trivial ...

I should have mentioned that the sine wave peaks at noon, local time. Sure seems like the sun.

I found an "kludgy" way to post the output of my experiment in nearly real time: http://www.techlib.com/solarflare.htm . I also slowed down the chart such that it holds a week's worth of data. I don't think timing is particularly important, frankly. If there's 24 hours from the event to the flare ...

The little dip I saw last night was pretty typical but there was very little solar activity today, at least on this side of the sun. In fact, the GOES satellite plot looks about as flat as I've seen( http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/plots/xray/20101222_xray.gif ). So much for reliable predictions. I ...