need someone to build a test unit

You might consider

a. Taking a freshman physics course and

b. Bottom posting.

John

I keep wondering if there is any practical, room-temperature way to demonstrate charge quantization with available electronic parts.

1 electron into 1 pF is 1.6e-7 volts, kinda small. Would any sort of math tease out the steps of a cmos gate discharging? Could something be done with an eprom, where not many trapped electrons make the difference between a 1 and a 0?

John

--
How do you know that?

Then the three-foot antenna makes even less sense. Tell us - or me (my e-mail address is real) - what you are actually trying to do, and somebody may be able to come up with a sensible proposition.

At the moment you have merely provided enough detail to give the imporession that you don't know much about what you want.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Just buy an old photomultiplier,connect it to a sensitive (audio) amplifier, cover it up . We did it with several layers of special black cloth. Switch on, and you get separate pops for each leaking photon and emitted electron. Lift a corner of the covering slightly, and the photomultiplier starts emitting a staccato of plops. One plop for each electron leaving the photosensitive layer.

And

c. Being less of a complete asshole

Perhaps he imagines a satellite antenna will grow out of his ass - like Cartman on South Park.

That is just wat you need in the above experiment.

OK, but it's really demoing the quantization of photons, sort of, and it doesn't quantify the charge at all, or not unless you estimate the dynode gains. I was thinking of actually measuring single electrons.

If you observe the output of a high-gain cmos opamp connected to a capacitor (which could be its own internals) there will be a step for every electron of leakage, but it will be way below the noise floor. Since the electron leakage is random and the noise is random, I can't think of an obvious way to signal-average the output and reveal the steps.

If the electron leakage were triggerable, one could measure the signal before and after each shot, and dig the steps out of the noise. Maybe you could inject a shot of charge capacitively, statistically roughly one or two electron's worth, and average out the resulting signal change, and show that it's quantized into steps.

An eprom is still interesting, since the geometry and charge are so small.

John

Then call Agilent or Tektronix and get it off the shelf.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I think most of us did. It sounds like a mishmash of poorly understood high school physics, really bad B-movie script writing, and the babble that you hear from panhandlers who have been off their meds for years.

As Bill Sloman suggested, perhaps you need to step back a few paces and tell us what you're _really_ trying to do -- if it's physically realizable, maybe someone will help.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

what if you have a 12 stage photomultiplier like i do ?

--
"I am never wrong, once i thought i was, but i was mistaken"
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

On 22 Oct 2006 09:23:43 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in Msg.

We're not interested in what you might be using this for, and your text is both boring and non-descriptive. But your post has brought up a couple of interesting ideas, which we prefer to discuss instead. That's how Usenet (of which you, being a "googlegroups" poster, probably have never heard) works.

robert

Bottom posting is what I'm doing, putting a response *after* a question. That is the standard usenet convention.

And the physics would help you understand things like charge, current, and physical reality, and learn some terminology. Well, maybe sophmore physics.

Do you know the charge on an electron? Do you know about electrical noise? Any idea of the magnitude of voltage that will be induced, by ambient RF, into a free-space antenna of your suggested dimensions? Ideas like yours can be tested quantitatively so see if they have a remote chance of working; if it's demonstrably hopeless, there's no reason to start building stuff.

John

Because that is one of the parameters of the design.

I did not refuse to provide details and would have if someone had asked. I tried to make the posting short and list enough information for someone to understand what I wanted if not what I intended to use the unit for. I expected that if it was not sufficient someone would ask for more details. No, they take it apart and say everything that it is or isn't and call me an asshole with an attitude. I will be the first to say I am not familiar with how this posting system works and I am sorry that I am viewed as having an attitude but my name is Larry, not asshole.

My knowledge is very limited in some areas of physics but I am well versed in the physics relative to the use and parameters of this unit.

Well, oil drops in the Milliken oil drop experiment will randomly gain/lose electrons during the course of the experiment. As well as having some doohickey which will help induce the charge change.

But I have a hard time seeing how with solid-state stuff you measure the electron and not some bulk property of the semiconductor more closely associated with holes (which typically have effective masses nothing like an electron...)

I never understood solid-state physics!

Tim.

OK, what's it for? What's it supposed to do? How will the data be delivered?

It's all too common here for newcomers to ask for impossible things to be done, and then have it turn out that they haven't even phrased their problem reasonably, or described what they really are trying to accomplish. Top posting, being secretive about actual intent, and using terms like x-quanta sets off alarms.

It seems to me that, from the description you've provided, it can't be done.

John

Larry:

You have walked into a very unfriendly and highly ego filled group. Not everyone here would treat you so poorly. I find it interesting that people take more time to type snappy replies to show how smart they are than actually politely answering a question. They seem to feel that your posting, rather than ignoring it, is intruding upon their space. I apologize to you for the treatment you have received here. If it is any comfort, you are certainly not the first to be treated so poorly, and unfortunately, not the last.

Bit farmer