I’ve got a tesla coil bought from a scientific equipment company. I want to reproducibly measure the intensity (amount?? flux??)of the ionized particles produced. Could it be as easy as setting up a multimeter? I could put one lead to ground and the other in the air space where I want to measure the intensity. Would this work? will I fry my meter if I get an arc to the lead? Is there some other way to measure this reproducibly?
I basically want to make sure the measure of ionized particles is consistent from day to day and time to time.