Of course a magnet will have an effect on an ion chamber, less on a geiger, but still some. ELF stuff tends to be << one gauss so it's not likely an effect you would see much. Perhaps worth looking at simply because it may itself be a byproduct of whatever causes it, and give something to correlate with. Just a few gauss along the correct axis should shut an ion chamber down more or less, by keeping the electrons confined until they can rejoin the ions. Too bad sensitive magnetometers aren't cheap, but for AC sorts of things, I think Charles made an antenna, and so have I, I built a 5+ hy air core coil to use as an antenna for things like that. Of course for AC kinds of things, the ion chamber walls make a pretty good shield via eddy currents. If it, as supposed by most, is a neutrino effect, well, we are awash in them from the sun (hot) and from all of time (not as hot), so anything that causes them to slosh around might do it -- but we have no clue what would cause that at the moment, else we'd not need the huge detectors we need now for them.
If you could prove it was neutrinos, and then what caused them to do it now, vs another time -- then you'd also have a handle on how to do things with neutrinos we don't have now -- that would be very valuable to have indeed. After all, the only force mankind knows how to diddle right now is EM, that's it. We don't do strong or weak force for example, and I've not seen flying pigs (except as fellow passengers on commercial flights), so no gravity either. To the extent we do anything nuclear, it's more like alchemy than chemistry at this point.
Right now, we need to see the effect at all -- then we need to see it on alpha decays, beta, gamma -- and see if they all do it or just one does. That will give a better clue what it is, for sure.
And that's not going to be an uber-trivial test to make either -- most alpha decayers have daughters that are beta decayers and so on....hard to test in isolation to say the least.
At some point, I think you wind up doing some sort of energy spectroscopy to get another handle on it all.
It's hard to see how neutrinos would affect alpha decay if the models are correct....all that normally should take is something that gets the internal sloshing in a nucleus going better, or less random -- which normally takes megavolt energies, though a little energy might give it a bit of bias. Other types of decay have more to do with things neutrino.
Here's a few scans from Haliday -- Charles, you really want to own a copy of that one (info elsewhere on the board).
- An alpha decay chain
Here's some theory on alpha decay, that still stands up today. There is a huge correlation with half life and alpha energy -- just a little more energy makes the half life a very lot shorter.
(this leaves out some details elsewhere in the book re fine structure)
- Alpha decay theory as it stands (still)
Here's the ionization produced by an alpha vs distance from the source. As you can see, near the end of their range (lower energy) they do more. This was done with a tiny flat two grid ion chamber moved on a micrometer towards and away from a sample.
- Alpha ionization vs range curve
- Alpha Range vs energy
As always, click the pix for a readable size view, the board makes thumbnails of anything big. Also, print kinds of stuff is a lot more readable and a lot fewer bits if you threshold it to B&W and make it a gif. Jpg's don't compress text very well. (I use "the gimp" for this)
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.