I'm editing this, and will remove this line when this is complete. It's taking a couple of hours to chew up a ton of video and get it happy up on youtube so I can put it here.
A discussion about whether we made tritium on the fusor run data area had some suggestions for further tests, and I did most of them and am reporting them here. After all, this is the area for discussing measurements. I found out some things of interest that are puzzling me, so y'all chime in with observations once you see the vids and comments I'll make.
This first video is a series of clips connected that show some basic mass spectrometry, what I see when I do this, and what happens when some powerful quartz halogen lamps are turned on inside the tank to blast gas off the walls, as well as what happens when one turns of the spectrometer's ion source filament.
Here's the url in all its glory if you want to go straight there.
Sorry about the fuzzy focus. That camera is even worse than my old eyes are at close range. Perhaps I should try taping a reading glasses lens over it and see if it helps that as much as it does me. At any rate, the fuzzy blobs on the left axis are powers of 10 in arbitrary units (more or less related to sensed ion current). Unless it's just scaled, the lower left is e-15 and the fuzzy blob about 1/3 of the way up is e-14 -- somethings. Amps? Not quite, but close.
Here's the url for the next video, when I let in some D and see what I see. At this point no power has been applied to anything but the spectrometer itself in the system. Now, Chris, before you get too excited, also see the last one, which is what puzzles me..
I didn't get the best and final D purity in the video, but I did get it in a screenshot, which by golly, you can actually read the numbers in.
Note that a line a 6 appears when I let in the D (along with some air and water, yuck, but I get most of that flushed out). No power other than the ~1kv levels in the mass sweep, 100v or so ion source, has yet been applied. I've never seen this before and I've checked this gas for purity basically at least one time for every time I fill one of the little bottles I use. But there it is.
Heres the stuff after running a discharge for 10 minutes or so, roughly 5kv at roughly 10ma. The neutron tube did click a time or two, but not enough above what it does on cosmic rays to say this made any neutrons.
And a screen shot.
I'll probably have a couple more comments to add once I've watched these myself (I just finished taking them and haven't played them back yet!), and gotten the screenshots off the other computer up to here, but the main one that strikes me is that yes, while I saw suspicious lines here -- pretty obvious -- once I began the real pumpdown again, the 5,6 lines went away more or less instantly, and they didn't do that after the fusion run, they stayed in proportion all the way back to tank base pressure. So, keeping one's nose up and trying to good science here, seems to mean I have to dupe a fusion run and look at that one, which I wasn't very careful (no more than normal) to do last time, else this isn't settled, in my mind anyway.
Edit: Comparing these to the screenshots I took on the fusor run, I can't easily tell the difference in the ratios of the 5,6 lines and the 4 lines from one to the other. Next time I do a more accurate measurement. The software lets you put the cursor over something and get an accurate numerical output on screen, which I didn't do these times. Though if I can't see it, it's probably not there, considering noise and other variables. Noise isn't bad at these levels (at e-13 and up) but...if we really made a bunch of T, you should see it without that I think.
Of course, I could do a really long run... So the only difference I can notice, and doggone it despite all that work with video didn't really catch it, is that on this fake run, the 5,6 lines more or less blinked out of existence as soon as I pumped down, much more quickly than in the real fusor run. No journal paper yet! (not that I want one)
The other comment worth noting -- even in this very clean system, and at pressures much lower than a normal fusor run, the mean free path is short enough to foul up the operation of a quadrupole mass spectrometer over a 4" long path, and is causing beam deflection errors in the 1/2 inch range at similar energies to those proposed for Cris's idea. This doesn't bode well for things like focus over long paths, Coulomb forces completely notwithstanding -- that would be another error source. And note how much other "junk" there is even in a super-clean system! Well, for hobbyist it's clean, for pro, not so much. I'd have to get rid of all viton and get an ion/sublimation pump to go truly "pro grade" here. And probably take a few things out of the tank that are in there now, such as a couple of solder joints on my multi-wire feedthrough connectors inside the tank. Yes, we've seen the lines for tin when the thing is warm...not hot, mind you, just warm. Zinc you can see at room temperature. And Cadmium. Anyone building a system, watch the silver solder alloy if you use any, many have Cd in them...
For completeness, here's what it looks like right now (a couple hours of pumping I guess, no baking)
I caught this right at the end of a sweep when it was doing that screen color flip you see in the videos. It nicely shows pretty closely with lines are likely "real" -- coincidence, but after this week, I'll accept luck.