Re: need a simple way to detect charge of radioactive particle other than electroscope



Jon Hightower wrote:



Today, I built the electroscope you linked to here:
 http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/1805/electroscope.html
Unfortunately, still no results.  I tried the comb test as described and
nothing.  Basically, for part of my lesson, I just want to show that alpha
and beta radiation has charge as I'm no longer concerned with trying to
determine polarity.  The sources I have are small, plastic embedded discs of
1 uC beta and gamma emitters.  I lack an alpha source, but I am thinking of
using Am 241 from a smoke detector.  I have tried bringing the beta source
up to the top of the electroscope, but no result.  As I can't get the
electroscope to work anyway, I don't know if the reason is due to too weak
of a source or just a fault in the electroscope itself.



Pour some salt into a watch glass and wait a couple of hours. If it dissolves into recovered atmospheric water, your humidity is too high.


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