32 What sorts of experiments are there for high-school students? How can I get the equipment? Has anyone else done this? (Fusion)
Description
This article is from the Fusion FAQ, by Robert F. Heeter heeter1@llnl.gov with numerous contributions by others.
32 What sorts of experiments are there for high-school students? How can I get the equipment? Has anyone else done this? (Fusion)
While there are few fusion experiments that would be feasible
at the high school level, there are a number of interesting
possibilities for plasma physics experiments. (There are
people here at PPPL, and probably elsewhere, who can provide
demos and/or assist in developing experiments; if anyone
is interested in this, let me know and I'll pursue this further.)
There are a couple simple plasma demonstrations which
would probably be feasible. If one has access to a microwave
oven, one can simply insert a sealed tube containing some sort
of low-pressure gas (such as a fluorescent light bulb), and
then run the microwave. The microwave radiation will ionize
the gas, forming a microwave plasma discharge, if the circumstances
are right. (This may not be all that good for the microwave,
however.)
An easy way to observe the confining effects of a magnetic
field would be to build a fairly large magnetic coil (fields
of around 30 gauss will give a nice effect) and run a fluorescent
light inside. (The Helmholtz configuration, where the coil
radius is equal to the coil separation, gives a fairly uniform
magnetic field in the region between the coils, and would be
better than a solenoid since it would make it easier to see
inside. Moving the coils away from each other will generate
a magnetic mirror configuration, which also has some interesting
physics to it.) This will be best if you can see inside the
fluorescent bulb, instead of just seeing the phosphor glow from
the glass tube.
If one has access to a vacuum pump and a high voltage (2000 V)
power supply, it is also possible to build a glow discharge tube
instead of using the fluorescent light bulb. Air will give
a pretty discharge, but helium and neon and argon are also
interesting. I have draftings and instructions for building
such a glow tube, which could be built as a high school project
for high schools with a small machine shop (courtesy of Tim
Bennett at PPPL).
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