Tc-99m : Cardiac Stress Test
Author: Jay HowsonNovember 2021 In September of 2021 at a fairly routine cardiologist appointment, I was informed my EKG shows evidence of my having had a heart attack. Which was news to me. Needless to say, the doctor ordered an array of tests, and was very surprised to watch me put my hands up…
Rutherford Scattering
Author: Tim & Eva INTRODUCTION It has been over a century since Ernest Rutherford interpreted the bizarre results of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden’s scattering experiments: the atom has a small hard positively charged nucleus surrounded by an electronic system – the true birth of nuclear physics! This is known as the “gold foil”…
Gamma-Gamma Coincidence
Author: Tim I have waited 25 years to perform this experiment. All I needed was a second ORTEC ScintiPack to execute it. Well, not really, but the recent eBay opportunity to get a second ScintiPack sure made it easy… I had everything else waiting for it’s arrival. This experiment exploits the gamma-gamma coincidence of…
Measurement of excited Np237 half-life via the alpha-gamma coincidence method.
Author: Tim 241Am is a favorite source for nuclear scientists, as it is readily available for experimentation with geiger counters, cloud chambers, spectroscopy and the like. 241Am decays 100% via alpha emission to 237Np, approximately 85% of those decays are accompanied with a 59.54keV gamma ray. The origin of that gamma is not the…
Jay’s Diffusion Cloud Chamber
Author: Jay HowsonDate: April-2019 Intro I was presented with the opportunity to run a lab for a non-profit organization called STEM-ing. Their objective is to get girls in grades 6-8 interested in the STEM fields during those critical years where they are trying to figure out what direction they want to go in in…
Rotating Drum Camera
Author: Tim For my other UMD research, high-speed imaging is necessary, so I set out to find an inexpensive and robust high speed imaging method. Current state of the art systems are many hundreds of thousands of dollars and were simply out of reach. However, after several years, a few eBay finds and some…
Dark Room
Author: Luke, Jimbo & Tim The dark room is an essential tool for many nuclear and high voltage projects. Some experiments produced electric and RF fields that would damage a typical digital camera (and have). Some specialty diagnostic system, such as high speed cameras and spectrographs still use film. Tim and his friends helped…
X-Rayted Photos
Author: Jay, Jimbo, & Tim The following video was created at a friend’s kitchen table, with and induction transform driving a demonstration Maltese cross Crooke’s tube. My Nikon DSL was connected to a NaI based image intensified imaging tube:
Neutron Induced Gamma Rays
Author: Tim Fast neutron can inelastically scatter off of nuclei in other materials and leave the nucleus in an excited state without transforming the element. The exited nucleus quickly “rings down” by the emission of a gamma ray. For example exited iron will decay with a 847keV gamma. The follow experiment shows a collection…
