Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Yours and mine. This is where you can gas on about how you think the universe works. To a point, after that we'll expect you to actually test your stuff and report.

Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Oct 14, 2010 1:58 pm

Good observation Chris! I note interesting bursts on my 3He tubes here, and no way is the pressure affecting the tube itself (or the geiger counters and other things). Makes a bit of sense since the hottest showers are actually under a little more mass than air -- about a few inches more thickness of some solid gets more cosmic showers under it than "nothing" + air does. My guess on the tubes is that not only does a hot enough charged particle from a cosmic trigger it, but they probably also knock real neutrons out of the moderator as well, which get counted the normal way.

I think despite Charles' superior technique with ion chambers and very low currents he's going to wind up with having to have a control chamber to get real useful numbers out of it.
And I'd be doing that no matter my faith in the detection media anyway, based on flukey things I've seen in the past. The background noise variability is just too high to get by without that.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby charleswenzel » Sat Oct 16, 2010 12:03 am

I'm still fighting little gremlins; I might have just squished the last one. I was having a tiny temperature drift, about 0.1 C, when I realized I could simply lift up my homemade temperature controller and toss it in the oven with the experiment. One theory I had on the pressure is that it is affecting the temperature chamber's sensor. It is an air temperature sensor. If I still see any temperature drift, I'll change tactics and directly heat the internal box or add temperature compensation to the controller - sounds awful, but the needed correction is pretty small.

I just disconnected all the compensation, so I can get a fresh plot to determine the pressure correction I need, if any. I would think that a tiny leak would take hours to change the pressure within the case with such a small differential, but I wasn't seeing the time lag I would expect. I can take it to work and give it a gross leak test fairly easily. Another idea is to toss one of my pressure sensors inside the case, so I can monitor the internal pressure. Then, there would be no question as to whether there is a significant leak.

The trouble is, whenever I do something inside the temperature chamber, it's a good part of a day before things stabilize to below the 0.1% level. I don't have an identical chamber as a control, but I have a much bigger ionization chamber sitting nearby that should provide the same function. I can see a daily curve in the background with it, but the level I'm seeing would produce an awfully small response in the tiny experiment chamber, compared to the americium. I've only seen a couple of unusual early morning readings well above normal but nothing was visible on the experiment's plot.

A scintillator would make a nice second unit. It's funny how much easier the little ion chamber appeared at the beginning.

It's been drawing a nice, straight line for the last 3.5 hours, but the pressure is fairly steady, too.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby charleswenzel » Sat Oct 16, 2010 5:14 pm

Oh, so close, but no cigar! I was going to post my prediction of a flare today, simply out of frustration. My chamber drew a perfectly straight line all night,seemingly impervious to everything, then started "acting up" for no apparent reason. See: http://www.techlib.com/newprojects.htm . There was a big flare at 2:00 PM today. I'm making no claims, however! This will turn out to be a fire ant infestation or something. It looks convincing, however.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:14 am

Well, I'm impressed :D . A few more like that and I think we have some kind of decent proof and data on this. You just need more points to prove that two unlikely events are really causative, rather than random-luck-correlated.

I broke my rule just this once about editing other's posts to fix your link and make it clicky -- I want everyone to see this, so I made it easier. In this case the issue was no leading space on the url, so the board software couldn't figure out that it was a url. Sorry about that, maybe I should post how to do URL's someplace more prominent. If you just want a url to show up verbatim, just make sure it's complete and surrounded by whitespace. If you want some other text to show, but link to something (like some huge long url that isn't self explanatory), highlight the text you want to represent the url, then hit the url button above. You'll see the url tags show up on both ends of the text you had selected. Now move the cursor just inside the closing bracket of the first url tag, and add an equal sign, then paste in the url inside the closing bracket. When done, it looks like this: (I will use the code tags so you can see what it looks like to the person editing their post)

Code: Select all
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SURma5PlfGs]Some levity is always good.[/url]


Which looks like this when not inside code tags.

Some levity is always good.

The code tags are nice for anything you don't want the board software to do something "stupidly automatic" to.

Of course, for this case you can simply embed the video using the trick described here.
This seems to be something that confuses new people here, which is why I'm posting the instructions all over, I'm not dissing Charles here at all. (but I'll thank Jerry again for finding that trick for us).

Great work, Charles! I suppose I'm going to have to replicate it here (on different gear of course) so we have more info. It makes sense that if solar activity is relevant, and something like neutrinos are the proximate cause that you'd see a pretty good time lapse between one and the other. Neutrinos are speed of light through just about anything, where the interaction between magnetic field lines and plain old plasma may take some time to work its way to the solar "surface" from wherever it started -- the plasma kind of traps the lines via eddy current kinds of effects, so it takes awhile for them to move. If you can really predict flares or mass ejections, I know some people in the space business who'd really like to have that....Good show!
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.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby charleswenzel » Mon Oct 18, 2010 6:20 pm

Oh, geez. Nature conspired to trick me. I'm still amazed by the timing of the barometric pressure changes. When the third one started, it just seemed too big to me, so I took your advice and suspected a leak. Comically, there was another flare right on schedule, about seven hours later. The sun hasn't been so active in months. Now, three peaks in delayed barometric pressure align with three flares six or seven hours later. That's just not fair!

I realized that I hadn't sealed some mounting thru-holes in the case. (They rely on the gasket.) So, I applied plenty of sealant and reinforcing tape so that they can't blow out, and now I'm getting a flat chart. The leak was delaying the pressure effects by a couple of hours, making it hard to see the correlation. I noticed it settled much faster and I guess that says it all. So, now I wait for another M class flare.

I'm also restoring the original unit, so maybe I can have two running at once.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby charleswenzel » Mon Oct 25, 2010 6:35 pm

I think I have the final configuration for this experiment. (Seehttp://www.techlib.com/newprojects.htm). A few tenths of a percent will be huge on this scale. I've ruled out barometric pressure as a significant influence and the temperature controller is performing well. Let's see if I can keep it running long enough to see, or not see, something.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Oct 25, 2010 7:31 pm

Looking good! I'll soon be able to chime in with some observations from here, as our data acquisition code and setup is just about done, so we can have a couple sets of numbers to ponder.
Today, FWIW, our background was well on the high side of average, 60-72 cpm being the middle today, where 42 is the normal long term average. Once I get a couple more cables etc made, I'll start a longer term collection of background data to augment your effort. If I get ambitious and have a chance to do it, I can add another channel that has a geiger with a source on it to compare as well.
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.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby charleswenzel » Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:06 pm

It will be convincing if we both see the same signal. I'll try to post a plot every day, at least for a while. I'm contemplating how to automatically post the current plot to our server, but it has become difficult due to a change in service. I have another server at work that I might be able to figure out at some point.

How many big solar events happen with no response before we get to cry foul? Proving a negative is difficult!
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Oct 26, 2010 7:06 pm

Right. I've got some infrastructure minor issues here as well so I won't be able to start posting plots right off -- nothing serious, just that to keep my other data aq intact and not waste too much power, I have to put another logger together (easy and fun, but some hours) and work up the junk to pull out plots from the resulting DB -- which I need to do anyway for the fusor. So, just a matter of putting in some hours on it, and dedicating one of my old lower power draw machines to do the logging (like a pentium 3 tualitin, only about 20w without the monitor). If you're like me, you have this rather long list of things to do....which re-orders once in awhile. I'm usually doing something on one of the top ten of what amounts to an infinitely long list -- I basically just pick what looks best each day to put some time on. This one just made it onto that part. Sigh, my lab assistant is leaving for greener pastures...So it will be interesting.
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.
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Re: Solar Flare/ Radioactive Decay Rate Link

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Nov 03, 2010 5:09 pm

Hot old time on the sun last week, see movie.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/pickofth ... opping.mpg
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