So it appears that I have run into a little problem...My computer power supply went bust! Mind you, it was only $17 from Addison Electronics, so don't buy power supplies from there if you know the franchise (my friend had a similar experience with one which just did not supply any voltage). So they're defective. I opened it up and thought that maybe the capacitors were busted, but they were fine; the voltage is just getting lost somewhere...Anyhow, I'll probably buy another one soon to get this project under way. I have a 13V supply that I could use, but I need more power than the box provides, since the peltier coolers suck up quite a bit of energy. In other projects like this they sometimes use a couple of power supplies like laptop chargers, but that's a bit of a hassle so instead I would prefer to use one power supply for the LEDs, peltier coolers and cooling fans instead of splicing and soldering wires everywhere. I'll keep updating on the power supply situation.

Fun with peltier coolers!

So here is a couple of photos of the materials I gathered to make this electrically powered cloud chamber: I have a regular computer power supply (that broke on many occasions), a massive microprocessor heat-sink, thermal paste, solder, soldering iron, archaic voltmeter and of course the source of my frigid environment--the peltier coolers! the coolers are made of copper and bismuth, when an electric current runs between the two metals, heat exchange takes place resulting in one side that cools and the other that heats up (hence the use of the heat-sink to remove the excess heat). But it's missing one critical component...the source of radioactivity! I use Americium 241 since it's commercially available in smoke detectors (it's a tiny piece of metal enclosed in a metal casing). These coolers are needed to supercool the alcohol vapor, so an efficient thermal transfer is necessary to prevent overheating one side of the peltier coolers. To do this I will use regular thermal paste to increase the medium of contact through which the heat transfer can take place.

Next time, the building begins!

Theory behind the project.

Before the era of computers and detectors, the only way to detect the paths of elementary particles was to use cloud chambers. A cloud chamber is a closed system containing air that is saturated with alcohol. Applied to this system is a heat gradient usually done by cooling the bottom with dry ice and leaving the top at room temperature. Usually alcohols are solids at -80 (temperature of dry ice), but due to this gradient they do not solidify in the air and are cooled way below their freezing point and thus termed "supercooled". This supercooled alcohol becomes very sensitive to minute disturbances and can condensate in mid-air. Scientists discovered that this was a very useful method for visualizing the trajectories of charged particles: electrons, muons and alpha-particles. While primitive nowadays, cloud chambers were an integral step in the early particle physics experiments.

Particle trajectories and interactions visualized via cloud chamber.