CERN at Home: Building a Particle Detector
What do you do when you’re stuck at home with a 16-year-old son during a pandemic lockdown? Well, the first answer is that you build a gaming PC. That was a good project with a lot of incentives to complete, but that also meant it was soon over. So, what next? I spotted a post about an outreach project from CERN to build your own particle detector for under £30. Sounded like fun, so here’s how we got on....MUCH MORE
Firstly, a bit about ourselves: I’ve just retired from an IT architecture role at a major UK bank, a brave decision when you still have a child at secondary school and there’s a global pandemic looming. My son, Sam, has just completed his GCSEs and is about to enter the sixth form. I have a degree in Physics and Sam has a keen interest in scientific things. We both suffer from hypermobility of the finger joints, meaning that we have limited fine motor skills (translation: we are both klutzes. Even klutzes can successfully build this detector.) I haven’t picked up a soldering iron in anger for a long time and Sam has only done two or three connections for a school project so we are effectively total noobs to this sort of project.
Anyway, here is a write-up of our experience and lessons learned from building the electron detector. If you’re planning on building one yourself then you may find this useful
Buying the components
The great thing about the CERN kit is that you can order most of the parts easily using kitspace. Can you really build it for under €30 (about £27) as claimed? Well, yes and no. The exchange rates have all moved, which doesn’t help. The individual components certainly cost less than €30 but you cannot just buy individual components. You have to buy 10 resistors at a time but they are dirt cheap and you’ll just end up spending 30p instead of 3p for the parts you need. The biggest surprise was that you have to buy a minimum of three circuit boards, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It’s handy to have a spare board if your soldering skills are questionable, plus the alpha detector variant uses the same board so you have an incentive to build that model too. All-in-all, the cost of all the electronic components same to just under £40. If you were buying for a class project – a dozen or so boards – I think the bulk price would be closer to £33/€37 per board.
Next up: "Learn How to Build a Nuclear Fusor"
