SPARK CHAMBERS

INTRODUCTION

Spark chambers have been widely used at the beginning of the 19th century to study subatomic physics. They consist in a stack of metal plates placed in a sealed box filled with a noble gas. When a charged particle from a cosmic ray travels through the box, it ionises the gas between the plates. A high voltage is applied between each adjacent pair of plates before that ionisation disappears, then sparks can be made to form along the trajectory taken by the ray, and the cosmic ray in effect becomes visible as a line of sparks. Adapted from Wikipedia.

On this video you can see a real spark chamber in action. The particles detected are cosmic rays (to be precise they are secondaries cosmic rays, essentially composed of muons at sea level). Read Cosmic ray on Wikipedia.

COSMIC DETECTOR

The Spark Chambers started with the intention to create random spark chambers to illustrate the principle and let the collectors discover the cosmic ray continuous showers. I ended up with a nice design and different particle interactions... In real life, Spark Chambers are not randomly produced like these ones, but it is the charm of generative art to build things like you want them to be...

Muons

Muons are the dominant part of cosmic rays. As charged particles they ionizes along their path and produce the most common tracks seen in Spark Chambers. They do not loose much energy and so essentially cross the device unaffected.

Muons DIS

Sometimes (rarely) muons can interact with a nucleus through a Deep Inelastic Scattering process. In this case, the nucleus is partly broken and numerous particles are produced (you only see the ones with an electric charge).

Neutrino

Neutrinos are neutral so they do not appear at first... but if they interact they can produce a lepton (electron, muon, tau). Here, to be precise, we observe something like a muon-neutrino charged current elastic scattering (quite complex in fact...)

Neutrino DIS

Like muons they can also perform a Deep Inelastic Scattering (only the shower of particle appears).

While the Muons cosmic rays are produced with the real angular distribution (the flux going down as cos2(theta) with theta the angle from the vertical) and the flux (number/seconds) looks reasonable (in slow time mode (press t once)). All other stuff do not contain physics and are not real. You will spend a lifetime looking at real showers, and you will never see a real Cosmic ray neutrino in your Spark Chambers (neutrinos have though been seen, and even discovered with spark chambers... but these neutrinos were produced by an accelerator). So in real life you would only see going-through muons... it's to add some variety (and fun) that I've introduced DIS and neutrinos.

Ask your questions on my twitter, I'll be happy to answer and I'm sure it would interest lot of people (I've worked in the Cosmic ray field for many years, Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays to be precise).

COSMIC PAINTING

After some reflexion I considered that proposing a Spark Chambers alone, despite its pedagogical interest was not enough... so I decided to use the Spark Chambers principle and the cosmic ray flux to actually paint the canvas... I know that collectors do not like animations in general. So I propose at first a nice Cosmic painting, with very different output (depending on some features to introduce variations and rarity ranking).

Interactions

If you want to interact and animate your token you can (press h for help menu).

Short tour :

press SPACE and let the image be filled with Cosmic rays... you'll continue to see them appearing even when the canvas is filled
press a : enjoy a painting refreshed every 30s
press m : see the cosmic rays sparks... press t once to have a more realistic view (pause of 1.5s at each event to allow you to pause and capture). Press q to fill the whole page...

The list below shows all the possibilities

RELOAD

0 : reload the page and start again

ANIMATION

SPACE or ENTER : pause/start the animation (by default the animation is paused)

SAVE AND RESOLUTION

1, 2, 3... 9 : change the resolution (page reloaded)

s : save in png format (best to pause before saving)

CHANGE DISPLAY

m : toggle between principal modes (CP and CD)

a : toggle auto-mode for CP

q : toggle between square format or screen adapted

r : clear the display

t : change the time base (3 modes Fast => Slow => Medium => Fast ...)

c : change color palette

e : change detectors layout

MOUSE

Left click : pause/start the animation

Right click : toggle principal mode (CP and CD)

MODES INFORMATIONS

CD (COSMIC DETECTOR) : displays a Spark Chamber, noise and Cosmic Rays

(with realistic angular distribution),

Slow time mode have rates closer to reality (~100 cosmic rays/m2/s at sea level)

CP (COSMIC PAINTING) : default mode. Canvas is painted with sparks thanks to Cosmic Rays and noise.

Drop

Drop will occur the 22-2-22 at 12h30 CET. 144 Ed.

Minting process will start as a Dutch Auction (10-8-6 tez every 5 minutes).

Then no change for 24h... then it depends ;)

Price may change during all the mint lifetime (up and down).

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