At 08:01 AM 9/10/2009, you wrote:
Additional thought, the protective film itself could also be made of CR-39 (which could be of the same batch, milled down to a few microns thickness), this would guarantee that the cathode lies on exactly the same substrate as in a non-PACA experiment.
Is it possible to mill CR-39 and polish the surface (so that it is very clear)? I suspect so. It's also conceivable that CR-39 can be purchased as specially made, very thin sheets; I do know that CR-39 stacks are used for some experiments; highly energetic charged particles would create pits or holes across more than one sheet. So having a "protective" sheet of CR-39 would, from tracks on the back side and tracks on the outer sheet, produce very interesting evidence. The only background radiation that would produce coincident tracks would be that from during the experiment. This could be really neat and simple.
A friend suggested to me putting a beryllium salt in the electrolyte or possibly somehow on the cathode or in some form between the cathode and the CR-39 or other detector, to convert hot alphas to neutrons. Has anything like that been tried? Generating higher levels of neutrons would be highly desirable as a demonstration of a nuclear effect.
