different environment, the land of the sea, the forests and breathtaking landscapes and amy for your on. 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 particulal 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 at today we're going to be talking about portical accelerators vand 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 porticle accelerator called vandday graph, the diff between vandaagraph 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 uh and right now the pressure inside of this container is around 20 atmosphere so around 20 times higher than the normal amount of the air around us uh so that's one of the defining characteristics of vandday graph which is named after the scientist 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 of metallic dome on the other side that holds a lot of charge, 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. and how

vandaagraph actually works. let's take a look at how vandagraph generator works. a vandaagraft generator's basic building blocks are large metal dome to store electrical charge, insulated motorized belt and one or two metal cones that rub against the belt. due to what is called the tribal electric effect, there's a transfer of electrons between the insulated belts and the conductive metal combes because of each. 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 plenty 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 are 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 vandaagraph, 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 uh 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. 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 vanday graft machine, so we have over here, this is pig e system, uh it can detect the gamma rays that are emitted as a result of the accelerated protons that collide with lighter cord elements so like let's say lithium which has an atomic number of three and then maybe up to uh floor 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 electron volts, they they can't really uh cause gamma emission on uh heavier materials. one thing to uh keep in mind is that um whereas in the tank of the vand 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 uh 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 possible speed. now we get to the main event, which is the pixie system, pixie not as in the fairy tale pixi pix e, which stands for a particle or proton- induced x-ray emissions. so uh, this one very much relies on the what is emitted from again the pro'. that collide with the materials, but in this case when the proton collides with certain materials with different atomic numbers, it can release x-rays and then we detect that x-ray to detect 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 piixe, we use the proton beams generated from vandagraph generator to determine the type of materials that exist within an archaeological sample in a non-destructive way, but how does that work? well, you already know that vandaagraph 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 accelerator. created 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 archaeological 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 micropixy

technique. so what we have right here is we have these three quadruples that essentially what they do is that whereas before we had area of 2 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 quadruples 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 micropixy system allows us to see, so the only place where really uh the pixie technique is uh able to help us in any way is that if we have a substance that is uh 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 place ( is 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 because if we're just looking at one random point in our uh object uh with the pixie technique and we're not finding that particular element that we're looking for, that doesn't necessarily mean that that element isn't in that object uh so we need to do a more thoro 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 within 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 design 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 huzistan plane in which the production formulation was based on sodium bicarbonate. when we look the history of glass production. can certainly see that this method of glass production was not coming in ancient iran. according to the

comparison we make, we realize that although these samples are found in khuzastan 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 imp silicon impurities uh 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 uh technique but other types of uh 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 kemenid empire uh 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 khan 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 uh stamp coins out of it, but the more

important thing that we understand is that 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, 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. 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 pixie and 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.

the headlines desar, the death doll from nearly six months of the israel us genocide in gaza keeps rising now nearing 3200. a new un imagery report shows 35% of the buildings in the gaza strip have been destroyed by israel's domicidal campaign. and the pressure on halting arms exports the israel gets more gains more momentum, the uk is considering to set conditions for sending weapons to the televive regime.