A bit of cosmic? ellectronics

Nice gadget. The article referenced in the Journal of Instrumentation is behind a paywall, of course, but the link below is free. It even has schematics.

HuygensOptics

Jeroen Belleman

Do cosmic muon bursts exist?

A few hundred detectors around the world could time stamp detection against GPS and then localize the direction of the bursts to high resolution. That's a new kind of telescope.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Can GPS allow time synchronization to 1 nanosecond?

If so, the detector separation can be 8000 miles. The resolution will be 1 part in 40 million.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Thank you very much, best link I have seen! Downloaded it as pdf, now time to see if I can get some parts. Now getting that scintillator is something I will look for later. I have a few simple scintillators here, probably not good eneough.

So this one specifically:

Not that I know. The usual phenomenon is a muon shower created in the upper atmosphere by an incoming cosmic radiation particle. They can reach the ground only because of relativistic time dilation.

Jeroen Belleman

Cosmic rays are remarkably energetic single particles. When they hit a single nucleus somewhere in the upper atmosphere they generate a burst of muons which are very shortlived particles

The muons tend to be moving quite fast when they are created, so time dilation means that they usually hit the ground before they decay.

If you get enough muons from a single cosmic ray you can put a lower limit on the energy carried by that single sub-atomic particle.

The highest lower limit is on par with a thrown tennis ball.

I think cosmic ray muons have been used to map the interiors of pyramids, I guess that in an endoscope rather than a telescope?

OK, then a physically small array of a lot of detectors could image a relatively local muon burst event. That might still be interesting and affordable.

Maybe find oil or water or something underground, or unexploded bombs or something.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Won't work. The detector has to be *under* the object being radioed.

The attempts to map a pyramid did not yield very clear results either. Apparently they managed to sort-of confirm the existence of a known gallery, and not much more.

Jeroen Belleman