The do-it-yourself cyclotron (2010)

There is a neat video about the cyclotron kids at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7tKxqwfZoE

Building a cyclotron is certainly a lot more involved than a fusor, mostly because they are physically large/heavy by their nature and also quite sensitive to their operating conditions, but certainly within the grasp of a dedicated hobbyist. The fact that one can create antimatter with refrigerator sized setup and a ~$10k budget is absolutely mind boggling!

I just finished reading The Making Of The Atomic Bomb and one of the things that really struck me is that the early experiments that Rutherford, Bohr and others were doing were only slightly outside the reach of a really motivated backyard physicist. $120k for a cyclotron is a lot of money, but the fact that a couple of teenagers can even dream of building one is cool. It really humanized the experiments and made the science much more interesting to me. It seems like back then anyone with some time, a modest amount of money and the knowledge could have a chance of making a real discovery.

Has anyone built a mechanical system like this? I envision a spiral track where B-B go in the middle, the entire spiral is mechanically oscillated back and forth, the balls are accelerated around the spiral with increasing speed as the frequency stays constant. A stream of B-Bs is emitted out the end of the spiral. Did I actually see this somewhere?

This is too cool.I wonder if you could make one from an old high resolution MS