We're gonna need a good vacuum, so conveniently, I had this turbomolecular pump laying around...

10:34 xray hit the camera sensor

OMG you built a Lenard tube! I've always wanted to do this. Amazing as always, so glad to finally see a good video about this. If you do ever want to mess with higher voltages, look at a linear potential drop accelerator. Can be powered by a standard cheapo van-de-graff generator (they're also called van de graff accelerators for that reason) and you've already got all the stuff to build it basically. I suspect you could get the lichenberg figures working that way. Also on the list of things I've always wanted to build

Things to put in the beam: CMOS / CCD sensor. Crookes radiometer Various (decapped?) ICs / semiconductors, see how their characteristics change voltage references / bandgaps Opamps Diodes transistors / mosfets

I hear someone who now knows the heart-stopping how-expensive-was-the-mistake-I-just-made sound of a turbomolecular pump yowling as it crashes to a halt.

"So if you have time in the Large Hadron Collider.." 😂😂

I really appreciate how this channel is filmed and edited. It's high quality without being gimmicky and slick like so many other KZfaq channels, which makes it easier to focus on the content and not the presentation (the lack of background music is especially refreshing).

Exposure to an area of bread to determine how well it inhibits mold growth.

A hot dog would make a great finger analog.

I’m a user of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, which has a 12GeV electron beam. Each aluminum ‘window’ is several millimeters thick to hold back the atmosphere, and so the beam traverses several centimeters of aluminum without losing much energy at all.

If you shoot anhydrous ammonia with it, can you dissolve the electrons in it and see a color change as they become solvated?

6:49 "Is this thing producing x-rays?" "Yeah you betcha!" lol you're great!

an EPROM chip could be interesting, while constantly reading it to see if the bits just get erased (like with UV) or get wildly flipped around because of the electrons

Loved it Ben. Next stop: demonstrate the wave character of the electron by placing a dual slit in the beam and a phosphorus screen behind it. Though, I must admit this experiment is a way more difficult than it sounds...

Try the Double-slit experiment

Would love to see you expose a micro SD card to the beam (or some other array type device), I wonder if you could attempt to make a cool but completely useless image sensor out of it (although I suspect the wear leveling to be a problem on modern ones). Connecting a metal plate to an analog ammeter and to ground and moving it around in the beam would also be a really simple but cool demo. I also wonder if considering this thing is putting out a good watt or two of radiation (might have to crank it up a little for this work) I wonder if you could put the aerogel (or some other low thermal conductivity material) into the beam and then cross section it while filming with a thermal camera, I would expect to see an interesting pattern as the beam is absorbed by the material heating it. I also see a lot of people are suggesting a cloud chamber, I would love to see that as I don't really know what kind of trails this thing would make.

I always marvel at your videos, but the comment section.. it's amazing how great community you've gathered on a platform none other than youtube. It's a pleasure to read these comments with so many insights and good questions. Your channel is like a microverse of curiosity, such a lovely place.

It'd be interesting to see its effect on a living thing - maybe part of a plant, or an agar plate with bacteria? I'm assuming it'd kill / sterilise the affected region very quickly.

A 100nm membrane supporting 1 atmosphere of pressure is absolutely mind-blowing

Stick something under it and put your XRF detector next to it! Since you're firing electrons at something, you can get characteristic x-ray peaks out of it, just like you would with any regular x-ray tube. This is just how SEMs do it!

Great stuff Ben! Any thoughts on adding beam forming plates or (A focus electrode) inside the device to focus the beam?

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

Humble improvement to previous comments: 1. Mist of fluorescent dye (e.g. zyglow). might need to dilute w/ alcohol. Mist w/ ultrasound. 2. Instead of bread, a standard test is agar in a petri dish. Touch with dirty fingers. Cover with plastic wrap (only 12 um thick). Sterilize! Thanks for another amazing video.

As always, some of the absolute coolest stuff and best production on youtube. Thanks so much for the effort.

I love how you show your process and explain why you do it that way. One day I hope to start a kind of lab of my own, and I love seeing all the different ways people use tools for various purposes. Thanks for the good content!

My father used to work in air traffic control for the RAF, I remember as a youngster (1960's) visiting him at work and seeing a small room full of CRT's all without phosphored screens. When a call sent by an aircraft it was received by multiple stations each remotely controlling a CRT, the beams projected across the room onto a large (presumably phosphored) screen to auto-triangulate the aircraft location. Hope my memory stands the test of time.

I love how you show how safe it is to irradiation is when sterilization is needed. Most of the time people freak out that their food is irradiated and they think they might get sick from it, when in reality it's safer being irradiated.

One time I saw a photo in a physics book of a cyclotron or synchrtron just discharging a deuteron beam straight into the air, it's an amazing thing to see a beam itself that's visible in the air.

When I was little learning about science and I tried to build a laser with a flashlight, cardboard tube, and tinfoil. Ben is what my child mind thought I could do, go into the garage and build that crazy thing. Keep being awesome.

Do you (or anyone else) have recs for similar channels with applied physics experiments?

I’ve been watching your videos for a few years and I’m always waiting for the next one. Thank you for sharing this with us.

I enjoy and appreciate the way in which you explain processes in such a simplistic manner! Thank you!

Wow! This channel deserve 10 million subscribers, I subscribed many science channels but no one is even close to this guy in coolness. Respect from india 🇮🇳

Could you post-accelerate the electrons after they come through the window?

What a fantastic video! I am blown away at how effective these things are. Thanks for another video that widened my perspective

Ben this is just an amazing video. For you to take the time to do all this stuff is just awesome.

Heh, "Aperture Science" Now you're thinking with portals!.

Wintergreen mints? Is there enough energy to light up something triboluminescent. Yes, I know - completely different unrelated process. That's why I'm curious.

Wow, you made these advanced topics really understandable.

3:11 I love how perfectly the bottoms of the tubes line up

It seems like the obvious thing to put in front of it would be a cloud chamber.

I don't know of any other channels that do what you do. You have underrated videos.

Thanks! That demo was highly illuminating!

Thank you so much for sharing I will make certain to watch all of your videos over time, truly a gift you are!

We have a 1 MeV electron beam at work for cross-linking of cable insulations, some of which go into nuclear power plants. For more common applications there are cheaper ways of cross-linking plastics. The irradiation happens in a concrete bunker due to the safety aspects of the emitted radiation. Unfortunately I have not got to play with it too much... which is probably a good thing :) Correction of how the heat shrink works: You first manufacture the tube in its final shrunk size and then cross-link it. If you then heat it above its melting point it will not become liquid, but it is instead a "rubber" which you can stretch it by a lot. Cooling it in its stretched state will cause it to freeze in place, and it will only go back after heating above its melting point at a later stage. This is extra apparent if you use transparent heat shrinks (for example PTFE) as they are often milky at ambient temperature due to the crystals in the plastic, but at the temperature when it starts to shrink it usually turns transparent as the crystals melt. (Note: PTFE does not work well with electron beam crosslinking as it degrades (does not like radiation), but luckily it behaves as a cross-linked material already from the start due to the high amounts of chain-entanglements)

"I've got some home made aerogel" ... As you do.

Great stuff. Also, glad to see the Andrew Seltzman e-beam videos getting mentioned. Those are just cool.

There is a really great experiment that can be used to measure the beam energy from a particle accelerator. You place a block of clear acrylic in front of the accelerator and fire electrons into it - the rule of thumb that I had been told was that 10mm of penetration equated to 1MeV of energy. The acrylic block is such a good insulator that once the electrons have pernitrated it they can't escape and are trapped. Once you are at this stage you place the acrylic block on a hard surface and using a 'center punch' and a hammer you apply a shock in a very concentrated point. The shock wave that travels through the acrylic block dislodges the trapped electrons and they come rushing out. There is a very bright flash of light and the electrons come out with so much force that the structure of the acrylic block gets ripped apart (at a very minute scale). The resultant 'damage' in the acrylic block looks like a tree like structure with a central trunk (where the center punch was) and the trunk separates into smaller and smaller branches. You can then simple measure how high the 'tree' is to be able to work out the beam energy.

Some ideas to try: 1. Put a hard metal in the beam and measure the increase of X-rays. 2. See what happens if you put a leaf foil in the beam path. 3. Epoxy a glass tube on the other side and see what happens with various gases at very low pressures (neon, Argon, CO2. also try a magnet or electromagnet coil to see if it deflects the beam. At much lower pressures you should be able to get the beam to travel further. 4. Make a tiny CRT tube instead of using the electron window, use a flat bottom closed tube or small erlenmeyer flask with the bottom coated with a phosphor & magnetic yokes to control the beam path.

You really overestimate the capabilities of the rest of us here, “one other trick if you decide to do this, the aperture has...” 😄😄

Always love your videos Ben!! Thanks!!💞💞

Thank you A LOT for making these videos (all of them) !!!

My dad was a physicist who designed field emission systems. In particular, he designed field emitter arrays for several systems. The big machine looked like a locomotive. It used a Marx surge pulse generator to generate high voltage at high current. It was charged at 8.6 kV and discharged at 2.5 MV. The pulse duration was in the 4 nS range. The pulse was directed into a cold cathode tube, which generated the electron beam. The device was used to x-ray bomb blasts in the desert, simulate atomic blasts, and radiation-harden semiconductors. If you were standing beside the unit, not in front, there was enough scattered radiation from one pulse to kill you.

I'd be curious about giving atoms some extra electrons. Like what happens if you take a chunk of sodium, shoot it with this, then throw it in water? Will it be "supercharged" with even more electrons than usual, and release more energy when you activate it? Another idea: stick Styrofoam peanuts to something with static electricity (maybe the lid to a plastic tote container) and see if this thing can knock the peanuts off. Would this travel farther in helium/hydrogen due to lower density? That would be cool to see. What happens if you take a second tube with a second window at one end, phosphor at the other end, and vacuum inside? Can you put window to window, with a gap of 5mm or something, such that it traverses air, then goes back into vacuum, and then can travel another 10cm before striking phosphor to make a spot? That would be neat, transferring electrons from one vacuum chamber to another, across an air gap.

Yet another wonderful video, thank you!

Thanks for reporting both your successes and failures. So many "science" channels are just demonstrations rather than experiments.

Can this be used to generate electride salts by just blasting an aqueous solution of some relatively electropositive salt/salts or something of the sort? Could be very useful to obtain an aggressive reductive agent without the need for special precursors.

Awesome video as always! One idea for another experiment: you could install a few solenoids in front of the cathode with incrementally increased B field to focus the beam to a tighter point. This could reduce the amount of wasted electrons that hit the anode and send more through the window. (I'm not sure if this vacuum tube is big enough for the number of windings and length needed, but I could run a quick simulation in Comsol if it seems like an idea worth trying.)

As always, WAY COOL!!! Thanks Ben.

I work in the wire fabrication domain and yes, we do use electron beam accelerators to modify the molecular structure of the insulation material. We use Polyethylene in those types of wire. As for the benefits are as follow: higher current capacity (as the insulation is more resilient to heat) , they do not catch fire(they just turn black, but they do not flame out) and if they are burned by an external source they are more environmentally friendly. Our machine is only 800keV in power but I found out that it’s almost at the top of the power, or it was when fabricated, for this kind of machines. The OEM is Vivirad France, and great safety measures were taken by the oem and our facility to prevent irradiation of the personal. (Mainly x rays, but there are also gamma and betta radiations emited by the various materials struck by the electrons)

Me, through most of the video: "Stick your finger in it!" Me, at end of video: "awwww". Nice work, as usual, I really enjoy your videos.

"Eventually, you just run out of atoms..." Pop by my place, I'll let you have a mole or two of whatever you need.

I love it when extremely intelligent people are able to dumb down incredibly complex topics to a level that I understand.

You are officially my favourite KZfaq experimenter.. amazing work.

sweet. homebrew quantum physics here we come!

Woah! Have you made a cloud chamber yet? Might be an interesting target.

It was an experiment that I wanted so much to accomplish but which I could not do. Thank you for doing this experiment.

When I watch these videos, I always picture you in a late 19th/early 20th century lab with bottles of coloured chemicals and big electrical equipment pushing the boundaries of knowledge, one bang at a time. Have you ever considered giving a Faraday Christmas lecture?

Applied Science: "Coolest thing I've seen in a long time" Me: "Most amazing thing I've seen ever"

I would really like to see you bend the beam with a magnetic field

This guy is just pure class.

I used to work in a plant that made shrink film. One product line (LTF) was scanned with X-rays before the tube was blown out in the bubble tower to full size and cut into two flat panels for winding. The X-rays were meant to crosslink the molecules of the plastic to strengthen the film across the web, since the extrusion of the tube already laid the molecules out straight. One year, during Christmas shutdown, the X-ray generator wasn't shut off, while the cooling system was. The X-ray tube and the power supply that drove it were both destroyed. The vacuum pump also had to be replaced because it had been sucking water from the cooling system. I believe that system used a very large turbomolecular pump because it was held at such a deep vacuum. While the line was down for X-ray repair, we replaced the thin Titanium aperture sheet on the scanner output. It was crazy to see how damaged it was from the beam. I don't know how thick it was, but it was ridiculously sharp on the edges so I was wearing two Kevlar/Stainless Steel weave gloves to protect my hands during install.

COOL!

"Other than my finger" That hadn't even occurred to me. What would happen if something organic got close to that? Can you try this on like a hot dog or something?

Well done Ben !

Ben, great work.

The electrons only have 25kev kinetic energy, so the highest charge they can give the acrylic is 25kv. This is not sufficient to cause much (any?) dielectric breakdown.

Film. Put a peace of 35mm film and let see what we can go through with electrons !

I'd seen that gopro video you mentioned before and was wondering what the dopant in those pieces of calcite were, now I know. Thanks for including that!

No way!!! Another thing I’ve always wondered about! You’re the man!

AS: one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time me: trying my best to understand why it's cool

I'm really wondering why they made these square instead of circular (Talking bout the window, not the whole structure), i bet the stress reduction by doing that would make posible to manufacture these even thinner

It would be very interesting to see the results of Millikan's oil drop. Another idea would be to irritate yeast or a biologic item that would be effected. Would be a great example of electrons power.

A good source of electrons are the filaments and surrounding tube from old style electron tubes,they are coated in thorium.

Soak some meat in a phosphorescent liquid then expose it to the beam to visualise penetration depth.

But how come we know the emitted light is Photon or electron?

I think this is the best science channel on KZfaq. The amount of knowledge this guy has is insane

Nice, i will like more videos about this and the applications., good job man

Things to put in front of the beam other than your finger: Your toe.

I've now got a turbo pump in my ebay cart, my wife is gonna murder me

Chased a turbomolecullar vacuum pump for a few years on Ebay.. and it was way beyond my range $$$. it have to be really awesome to have one!! Never the less that is literally awesome video, and it actually expand one's knowledge.. specially about cancer radiation treatment....

Your channel is great, subscribed. It's fun and educational, and that's what I like. Years ago, I found an big old school building, that I wanted to buy and live in. It's 13,000 sq. ft. As I was daydreaming about living there, I wondered how I would heat it. I'm into "alternative" stuff, as it was in those days. I finally realized I needed a small, intense heat source year-round, to run a generator and heat water, so I came up with my own design for a fusion reactor, using a collimated electron beam aimed down the axis of a cylinder. By my "best estimation" (lol) it would take 90% of its output to keep itself going. But I thought, WTH, all I need is some deuterium and tritium. It's probably a good thing I don't have a shop or access to power tools. Keep making awesome videos, thanks.

Within a minute club

I just finished watching your video on the laser diode that measures velocity, distance, cuts cooks and bakes

- Shoot some flames with electrons! - Try to charge metal items and see if you get a discharge from it OR charge non-conductive items and see if they repel each other - Try to make oil fly or move around Super interesting video as usual!

Amazing Bro! I love your channel!!

At work we have 3 of these machines that crosslink polymers in plastic. Specs are: 200KV, up to 460 mA. 48" beam width. Typically runs absorbed dose of about 5.0 MR. Filaments run 13.5 Volts. The window is 2 micron titanium foil, in front of a copper foil backing ( water cooled to absorb heat) Vacuum is 6.2x10-7 Torr, generated by 10" CryoTorr cryopump. Thank goodness for interlocks.

Being in lock down, I've probably spent to much time on YT. That being so, I've just 'discovered' your postings. Your range of science knowledge, its explanation and its application is magnificent. you are a polymath! Being a bit weird, I have a utopian dream. 40% Polymath, 30% Farmers, 25% Artisans, 5% Entertainers, and 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% Politicians. Keep up the good work, I now have a favorite YT channel.

I found it very interesting! Thanks for making this video :)

The process of making Lichtenberg figures in clear acrylic is quite an experience - the flash of light and audible noise when you shock the acrylic with a sharp pointed center punch is quite impressive. The process works well when you have a few MeV - the rule of thumb I was told is that 1MeV produces about 5mm of penetration in the acrylic.