Building a cyclotron is certainly a lot more involved than a fusor, mostly because they are physically large/heavy by their nature and also quite sensitive to their operating conditions, but certainly within the grasp of a dedicated hobbyist. The fact that one can create antimatter with refrigerator sized setup and a ~$10k budget is absolutely mind boggling!
I just finished reading The Making Of The Atomic Bomb and one of the things that really struck me is that the early experiments that Rutherford, Bohr and others were doing were only slightly outside the reach of a really motivated backyard physicist. $120k for a cyclotron is a lot of money, but the fact that a couple of teenagers can even dream of building one is cool. It really humanized the experiments and made the science much more interesting to me. It seems like back then anyone with some time, a modest amount of money and the knowledge could have a chance of making a real discovery.
> $120k for a cyclotron is a lot of money, but the fact that a couple of teenagers can even dream of building one is cool.
As the article said, this is the price for a build using brand-new parts. The prices of used lab instruments are significantly lower than their list prices, a 10x or even 100x reduction is not unheard of. So, at least its electronic instrumentation is going to be cheaper. Though, I know nothing about the mechanical, vacuum, or magnetic part.
Has anyone built a mechanical system like this? I envision a spiral track where B-B go in the middle, the entire spiral is mechanically oscillated back and forth, the balls are accelerated around the spiral with increasing speed as the frequency stays constant. A stream of B-Bs is emitted out the end of the spiral. Did I actually see this somewhere?
Joerg Sprave did something similar in 2013, but mechanically pushed the ball along the spiral instead of wiggling the whole thing. I like your idea better, and I bet it would be a fun project!
That sounds very similar to the electromagnetic accelerator by Hyperspace Pirate [1]. The difference is that it uses magnets to accelerate the balls instead of mechanical oscillations. And there is no stream in a strict sense.
Building a cyclotron is certainly a lot more involved than a fusor, mostly because they are physically large/heavy by their nature and also quite sensitive to their operating conditions, but certainly within the grasp of a dedicated hobbyist. The fact that one can create antimatter with refrigerator sized setup and a ~$10k budget is absolutely mind boggling!