+rep blew up the meth lab he made in our garage

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dudes got the "ick"

seriously contagious, so much so my teammate came down with the same thing and all he did was say "A Long"

Now 4 us of have the "ick"

Step 7 (Cont. *Final*)
If all goes well, you should see on your camera the image below, and you should be detecting neutrons at this point.

Operation is quite a balancing act, since the voltage is controlled by both the power supply, but also by Paschen's Curve and Ohm's Law relating to the pressure in the chamber. Great patience is required to "Get the hang of it", but after doing so it becomes quite simple to run. Operation can be aided by an ion-gun which will not be discussed in this article.

STEP 7: Fire It Up (and Cross Your Fingers)

Time to turn it on (don't forget to cover any viewports/cameras with lead! Also x-rays can pour out of ceramic feedthroughs so point them away from people. It is a good idea to be monitoring for x-rays where any people are present). The basic procedure is:

-Turn on the roughing pump and wait for sufficient backing pressure, turn on the diffusion or turbo pump and wait for it to fully warm up or achieve running speed
-Throttle the chamber back (with the valve between the diffusion/turbo pump and the chamber)
-Ever so slightly open the needle valve to the deuterium tank
-Turn up the high voltage until either plasma establishes on the camera, or you've reached 40kv and nothing has happened (don't forget, you only get one chance in your life to screw up with voltages of this degree)
-If nothing has happened, keep admitting more gas and the pressure should keep going up. Plasma should form around 40kv at about 10-15 microns of deuterium.

Step 6 (Cont.)
NIM Configuration: If you chose to make a NIM setup as I have, the typical layout is a charge sensitive pre-amplifier at the head of the proportional tube, which is plugged into both a high voltage power supply generating positive polarity voltage appropriate for the tube (in the range of 800V-2kV generally). The amplifier also hooks into a shaping amplifier, which is followed by a Single Channel Analyzer (for setting the detection discrimination level), followed by a pulse counter and/or rate meter.


Shown in the first picture is my NIM setup, the second picture is the pre-amplifier attached to a moderated helium-3 tube, the third picture is a bubble detector after being exposed to neutrons.