A recently came back from the 2015 ASME Intentional Design Engineering Technical Conference after presenting a paper I authored in the Emerging Topics in Micro and Nano Systems session of the conference. I had the opportunity my senior year to take a course in microelectromechncial systems, MEMS. In this class we were required to perform a … More ASME Technical Paper Publication
This apparatus was constructed using the machine shop after work summer 2014 and in the first couple months of my senior year. The results are rather stunning as each spark is an ionization event initiated by an incident alpha particle emitted from the Americium-241 source held by the tweezers. The physics department took interest and the device was used as a … More Alpha Particle Spark Detector
Can a Geiger counter do math? Indeed it can! Well it can at least be used to generate a stream of random binary which can be utilized in a Monte-Carlo method to perform the computation. This was motivated by a desire to build a hardware random number generator and verify that the numbers generated by the … More Calculating the Value of Pi With a Geiger Counter
Two years ago I joined a small group of students endeavoring to build a Farnsworth Fusor. Six years after the project was initially started, myself and my two compatriots were the first to observe a steady flux of neutrons emanating from the fusor. I realized the fusor could now be utilized as a neutron source … More Design and Manufacture of a Gamma Spectroscopy System
A number of projects, including my senior engineering design project and instrumentation in the advanced physics lab have required custom PCBs. Utilizing the dark room in the photo-lab at LMU’s art school, I exposed and etched the following boards using a positive tone photo-resist. The masks were made from inkjet printable transparent film and the UV source from two 8 watt … More PCB Fabrication
I tried to visualize the random data collected from a Geiger Counter turned hardware-random-number-generator by plotting random walks with two different constrains on a 2D lattice of points. One walk was left to freely meander and the other was instructed to not backtrack on itself once it had taken a step (self-avoiding). As there are four … More Random Walks on a 2D Lattice
With a spare roughing pump laying around the fusion lab, I attempted to sputter copper onto a glass microscope slide. A makeshift bell-jar was constructed from a pickle jar and high voltage feed-through was constructed using an alumina sheath and threaded steel rod. A circular piece of sheet metal was fastened to the end of the steel … More Thin Film Deposition Attempt #1
Reid Byron 