

Observing Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Smartphones [pdf] - mhb
http://crayfis.ps.uci.edu/paper.pdf
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mhb
To sign up: [http://crayfis.ps.uci.edu/](http://crayfis.ps.uci.edu/)

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evanb
arXiv link: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2895](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2895)

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fnordfnordfnord
This is way better than my idea of looking in peoples' propane tanks.

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TrevorJ
I'd love to hear the theory behind that?

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fnordfnordfnord
I can't help you much with theory, sorry. I'm a hardware type. The gist of the
idea is that propane is good for making particle detectors[1]; and since there
are propane tanks distributed fairly widely, then one ought to be able to
observe lots of cosmic rays from within them. The first trouble was figuring
out a way to build enough detectors, cheaply enough. I had hoped to come up
with something simple that could be installed without too much trouble. Most
of the good detector ideas would require the tank to be empty when the
detector was installed, so retrofitting existing propane tank installations
would be a super slow process. There are a lot of other problems with the idea
and we had other ideas to pursue at the time so we didn't go very far with it.

[1] Bubble chambers, spark chambers, flash chambers, drift chambers / tubes,
RPC's,

