Slayer driven neon-producing DC via resistor ?.

[tinman]

The miracle of induction is such that the voltage at one end of the wire is the opposite as at the other end of the wire.  So, assuming that it is the length of wire acting as the antenna: the times when the capacitor is positive on the probe, the neon is negative on that right hand wire, and that is when the neon glows on that side.

Err -no,not seeing how that can be-makes no sence at all to me in this situation. How can it be negative at one end of the wire,and positive at the other end at the same time in regards to this setup.Dont forget that the two wires are side by side(speaker wire),and if we use your analogy,we would have two negative voltages at the neon,and two positive voltages at the cap through half the AC wave,then inverted through the second half of the wave.. First up,the wire isnt acting as an antenna-well not that much anyway. I say this because if i remove the neon,we get near no voltage at all at the cap.

[TinselKoala]

Oh, you are using the oscillating E field from the slayer to light your neons. I didn't realize this. Ok here is what is happening, I think. Two things. First you are driving the neons with a rapidly oscillating AC RF voltage. So the electrodes of the neon are experiencing alternately, positive and negative _relative_ voltages. The negative one glows but they are switching back and forth at the RF frequency so there is no hope of picking up the event visually or photographically and it may even be shorter than the persistence time of the plasma glow itself, so perhaps both electrodes are constantly illuminated even though the plasma is only energised by the negative-most electrode in the gas.
The second effect is the field gradient. You should be able to take a bare neon, extend the leads sideways, grip it in a non-conductive holder and bring it close to the Slayer and have it light up, by "shorting" across the electric field with the neon's legs. Hold the neon so that the legs are tangent to the coil and it won't glow because you are parallel to the Efield gradient, hold it so that it is radial to the coil, "shorting" the Efield, and it will glow.  I use neons in this manner to determine the polarity of DC HV fields like from static machines like VDG, Bonetti, etc. You  poke the field and see if the electrode nearest the device glows, or the one nearest you glows, and this tells you the polarity of the DC field. If you turn the neon sideways it no longer is in the direction of the _gradient_ so no voltage develops across it and it doesn't glow.

So perhaps it's the field gradient that is doing the "rectification" you are seeing with your resistive antenna pickup system. I'm set up for other stuff right now and don't exactly  have room to pull down the Slayer and play around with it, but I might be able to get to it later on today.

[MarkE]

Err -no,not seeing how that can be-makes no sence at all to me in this situation. How can it be negative at one end of the wire,and positive at the other end at the same time in regards to this setup.Dont forget that the two wires are side by side(speaker wire),and if we use your analogy,we would have two negative voltages at the neon,and two positive voltages at the cap through half the AC wave,then inverted through the second half of the wave.. First up,the wire isnt acting as an antenna-well not that much anyway. I say this because if i remove the neon,we get near no voltage at all at the cap.

The voltage develops around loops. 

[TinselKoala]

Below is a simple test i carried out. It would seem one pin in the neon is recieving a higher charge than the other. Although both wave forms are in phase,we can see a potential difference between the two.There dosnt seem to be any offset in either trace though.

It looks like you have the Yellow trace baseline set a half a minor division below the center marker. This may be masking a little offset. You have cursors on that scope? Can you do a shot with just the yellow trace displayed at about 3/4 full screen height, with the baseline set exactly at the center graticule marker, and then use the cursors or the measurements to identify the max and the min of the waveform? It looks to me like there may be a little vertical asymmetry happening. P-p is less useful than max-min in this case, I think. If we have max and min we can get p-p from that easily enough.

ETA: Another useful technique is to deliberately set the scope's timebase to much slower than usual for the signal. This will turn the trace into a ribbon with clear top and bottom edges. This will also reveal if there is any lower frequency envelope modulation that you can't see by zooming in on the main sinus oscillation at 3 MHz for example.

[TinselKoala]

"7) It takes non-linear behavior to rectify even weakly.  This is not a function of linear: resistance, capacitance, inductance, and conductance."

You can't find a more non-linear circuit element than a neon, unless it's a raw spark gap. Them thangs is whacky for certain. Once you get them good and lit up they are great, used as voltage regulators in all kinds of old kit, like plasma Zeners. But between the firing threshold and the cutoff voltage they are strange beasts indeed and if they are biased to just below the firing threshold all kinds of things can set them off.

Got LN₂? Try immersing a running LED in some. Also try with the neon.