archaeology is the science of studying ancient artifacts to be able to find out what time period they are from, what materials they are made out of and other characteristics, but most importantly perhaps what can this artifact tell us about the people who actually made this artifact, what tools did they use, what techniques and technologies were available to them that made the making of this artifact actually possible, and we need to be uh studying that artifact in a way that we don't actually damage the artifact, and this is where using uh nuclear technology in particular using particle. accelerators can actually help us

with the imaging uh of these artifacts to understand what they are made out of and understanding all the other characteristics that i just mentioned so uh welcome to another episode of eron tech, i'm your host zan today we're going to be talking about particle accelerators, vandday graph portical accelerators to see how we can study ancient artifacts uh without damaging them in a lot more detail. so this is our particle accelerator, to be more specific, it's a kind of electrostatic particle accelerator called vandday graph, now the difference between vand graph compared with other types of electrostatic particle accelerators is that this one operates within a high pressure tank so the... whole mechanism, you can't really see

it, and right now the pressure inside of this container is around 20 atmospheres, so around 20 times higher than the normal amount of the air around us. so that's one of the defining characteristics of vandday graph which is named after the scientists that invented this machine uh, but its core again it is a particle accelerator, so what we want in the end is that we have metallic dome on the of other side that holds a lot of chalk. around 3 million electron volts to be more specific or up to 3 million electron volts and what we use that metallic dome for is that we inject some gases to then be ionized and then accelerated using that charge, but to understand it lot better, we need to take a look at the insides of it with some schematics to really understand how vand the graph actually works. let's take a look at how vandaagraph generator works a vand graph generator. basic building blocks are large

metal dome to store electrical charge, insulated motorized belt and one or two metal combes that rub against the belt. due to what is called the tribal electric effect, there is a transfer of electrons between the insulated belts and the conductive metal combes because of each material's different tendency to gain or lose electrons when rubbed against another. in that case, the transfer of electrons. happens from the belt side to the metal combes, resulting in a net positive charge carried by the belt. the positive charge is then transferred to the spherical terminal where it accumulates. the amount of accumulated charge in this case reaches up to 3 megavolts, which is planny for ionizing our target material, which emits protons upon interaction with the very high voltage stored in the terminal. when the high voltage is applied to the target gas, which

could be hydrogen atoms in the air, the protons within the target material gain energy and accelerated repelled to form a beam of high-speed protons. each proton beam is used to fulfill different research tasks. now that you know how vandday graph works, let's talk about what we do with the product that comes out of the vand graph, which is accelerated particles or rather accelerated protons that carry up to 3 million. volts, million electron volts of energy, so we have number of different beam lines coming out of the vander graph, which is on the opposite side of this wall, and much, this is much like the case that we had with the reactor core, which in order to use the particles that was emitted from the reactor core, which were neutrons, in that case, we had number of beam tubes to use them for different research purposes, and this is the same thing that we have right here, so i'm going to go over a couple of the different use case scenarios for the particles that have been accelerated with the... craft machine, so we have over

here, this is pig e system, it can detect the gamma rays that are emitted as a result of the accelerated protons that collide with a lighter cord elements, so like let's say lithium which has an atomic number of three and then maybe up to fluor and sodium, up to like 9, 10, 11 atomic numbers, so there's a detector for gamma that are emitted as a result of the collision of the protons with the cores of lighter elements, because uh protons with that level of energy up to 3 million electron volts, the they can't really uh cause gamma emission on heavier materials, one thing to uh keep in mind is... that um whereas in the tank of the vander graph we had to have high pressure to be able to uh collect more energy in the dome in the metallic dome here the lines are vacuumized so they have 10 to the power of six times lower air pressure compared to the air around

us which is like one atmosphere uh because we want as little obstruction as possible to the protons that have already been accelerated in the vanograph machine so we want them to collide with our particles at maximum. impossible speed. now we get to the main event, which is the pixie system. pixi, not as in the fairy tale pixie, pixie, which stands for a particle or proton induced x-ray emissions. so, this one, in very much relies on the uh, what is emitted from again, the protons that collide with the materials, but in this case, when the proton collides with certain materials with different atomic numbers, it can release x-ray. and then we detect that x-ray to detect uh what is inside our sample. now how the x-ray is released, why is x-ray released and why that matters to our purposes of research purposes of ancient findings? well, we're going to have to take a closer look at that. in particle induced

x-ray emission or pi-xe, we use the proton beams generated from vandaagraph generator to determine the type of materials that exist with. than an archaeological sample in a non-destructive way, but how does that work? well, you already know that vanta graph machine is a type of particle accelerator. vandaagraph machine is one of the earliest examples of particle accelerators that were also called atom smashers, because the accelerated particles would be smashed into a target material to see what would be created as a result of this high-speed impact. in this case, the result of smashing protons into our archeological sample is x-ray emissions of different energy levels. but why? well, this high speed protons can cause inner shell electrons of atoms to be knocked out of its orbit, which is then replaced by

an electron from higher energy level in higher orbits. as the electron moves down a level, some energy is released in the form of x-ray, but the x-ray. emitted by different elements have different energy levels that are detected by our x-ray detector and the pixe system to determine what types of elements exist within our sample with no damage to it whatsoever. now that you know how the pixie technique works and allows us to determine what material, what element is inside our ancient finding using accelerated protons and then the reflected x-rays that we detect that tells us what? element is in that material. now let's take a look a system that allows us to have more accuracy, which is the micropixi technique. so what we have right here uh is we have these three quadruples that essentially what they do is that whereas

before we had area of two square meters that we could detect the materials in, now we have much much smaller radius uh that the beam is actually working with, so the... quadriples focus the beams down to much smaller size, the proton beams, the accelerated proton beams down to much smaller size. now yes, that's a much smaller size that we can detect, but now we can actually scan an area like this and uh be able to actually cover a broader area and with lot more accuracy, so uh you can take a look at the schematics of what a uh micro pixie system allows us to see, so the only place where really uh the pixie technique... is able to help us in any way is that if we have a substance that is very even if it has impurities, the impurities are distributed evenly across the entirety of that material, but if that impurity is not distributed evenly, if in

some places there is that impurity and in some other parts of the material, we don't have that impurity, we need to actually scan the area to be able to make sure. that we are actually seeing that impurity, because if we're just looking at one random point in our object with the pixie technique and we're not finding that particular element that we're looking. four, that doesn't necessarily mean that that element isn't in that object, so we need to do a more thorough scan uh with the micropixy technique to be able to determine whether or not that impurity actually exists in some parts of that object, so that's the difference between the pixie technique, which is lot more rudimentary and lot more binary, so whether or not this element exists in this particular point, the micropixy technique allows us to know where that particular element is with: in this sample size, now let's take a closer look at what we can do with the data that we get from either of

these systems. when it comes to analyzing various materials, different characterization techniques have different usages. for example, we can use material spectroscopy in archaeological samples, biological and environmental science samples and specifically material science and reverse engineering samples. for instance, if we have an unknown industrial sample, we can produce our... designed material by elemental analysis and using reverse engineering. elemental analysis can also be helpful in identifying different features of archaeological samples. we have analyzed some samples found in plane in which the production formulation was based on sodium bicarbonate. when we look the history of glass production, we can certainly see that this method of glass production was not common in ancient iran. according to the comparison we make, we realize that although these songs. are found in huzistan plane, they must have been brought there from mediternan areas. this includes the trade

system of that time, and we can conclude that, such trades are not limited to the 20th century. so over here we have a couple of actual samples that date back to around a thousand years ago to the early islamic period in iran. so we can clearly see that this one has much darker color uh with some blueuish tints to it and this one has lot more green tint to it. well we can understand from the studies that have actually been done on this particular uh bracelet, both of them are bracelets, we understand that there is around 15 to 20% of iron as pigmentation uh for this particular bracelet, so we understand that at the time the manufacturers these bracelets had the knowledge to add to use iron as pigments. uh and with this one we understand that there's a lot more uh silicium oxide in silicon impurities to give

us this greenish tint so they had the knowledge of using silicon impurities as pigmentation so this was an example of the techniques that we can understand using the micropixy as technique but other types of data that the micropix technique gives us is for example the amount of power that a central government had during different. periods of time, so for example, during the keminide empire, because the coins that were stamped during that period were lot more pure in terms of the gold that was actually used in it, but as you progress over time, you see that for example the il khani empire had lot more copper impurities added to the gold, so not only we understand that they had the knowledge to actually add copper to gold and stamp coins out of it, but the more important thing that we understand is that the... the power of the central government declined during that time period and you can actually monitor the rise and decline of the power of

a central government uh when you take a look at the coins, it can give us loads of other types of information as well. this was just a couple of examples. it is crazy to think that just by taking a more close-up look at ancient artifacts we're able to learn so much about them and not just about them and the technology that was used to make them, but also the people that surrounded that artifact at that specific point in time, so we're able to triangulate and not just where the artifact was made, but also when it was made and with what technology, with what materials and based on the materials that was used, we learn about how advanced in their science that particular people and that particular time actually were and when that technology transferred to different parts of the world, all of that thanks to spectrometry techniques such as the pixi micropixi techniques that we showcase today and in iran especially we need to have access to these techniques because

iran being as old as civilization itself uh we naturally have lot more ancient artifacts to study our own past and uh with that said we've come to the end of this episode thank you all for watching i'll see you in the next time. one, you're watching ball here from, i'm your host.

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