I heard Billy Mays on TV this morning promoting a product that will do just that.
It’s $29.95, but if you order today they’ll send you two atom-splitters and a six-month supply of reprocessed plutonium.
Assuming that you’re talking about splitting the nucleus, no. Once you’ve exceeded the nuclear binding energies and caused a nucleus to fission, a very large amount of energy required to overcome the eletrostatic repulsion (called the Coulomb barrier) between free protons to such a close distance that the nuclear interactions (measured externaly as the residual strong force) take over and bind the protons together. Even sticking two free protons together (see [url=Proton-proton fusion]the proton-proton cycle) requires tremendous energies and pressures; jamming two much larger nuclei together (especially anything larger than nickel) is essentially impossible except in the brief, high intensity conditions of the collapsing core of a supernova in a series of reactions called the r-process.
Atomic nuclei, like Humpty Dumpty, don’t go back together again once they decay. The resulting bits usually flee away from each other like the springs and pieces in a disassembled drum brake, never to be found again.
Stranger
Actually, it turns out that bismuth is not stable (its metastable isotope, Bi209 has a half-life of 1.9 x 10^19 years).
Yeah, well, anything with a half-life several orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe is stable as far as I’m concerned.
Ignorance fought, and curiosity piqued! Thanks, Stranger!
Tripler
That second link is great–thank!
Do you want atoms to split in your home, or do you want to split an atom that would normally not split anytime soon?
The former is dirt simple if you can find the right material, but you have to be quick. Most of the stuff that decays by splitting lasts a very short time.
Uranium 238, the most common isotope, does fission (split) by itself. So, if you can get hold of some uranium, you can postulate to your friends that an atom or two has split as you’ve been sitting there. Proving it would be more difficult.
Finally, you can force a large amount of U238 to split. You’ll need U238, a source of fast neutrons, and enough of a chemistry background (including radiochemistry) to prove that you did it.
Now if you really want to impress your friends, you’d split an atom of beryllium into two atoms of helium. Whoa!
In that thread (or some other thread where David Hahn was mentioned and his sore-covered-face picture linked to) it was mentioned by somebody that the sores on his face look like the sores that methamphetamine addicts get from digging around in their skin all the time. Did anybody ever find out if his sores really were a result of radiation exposure?
If I understood correctly, the OP was looking for splitting an atom not a feat.
Weren’t the first cyclotrons rather small and could be built with easily found materials?
I had a copy of that SciAm. I really wanted to build the linear accelerator (along with the pulsed UV laser). However, it wasn’t really an atom-smasher. It only accelerated electrons, and the most you could hope for were some short x-rays - dangerous, but not atom-smashing.
Si
The general… no… the actually quite specific idea is that if and when they do burn up, you won’t be standing over them, sniffing.