Chris, yep, that's what I thought too. But we know that in beam on target types of things, there's no control over nuclear orientation, and that D does have a moment because it must -- can't be round given what it's made of. I have seen experiments where, like NMR, a big magnet was used to get partial control over this (even with neutrons, which have a kind of moment of their own), but nothing that relates to any fusion cross section. Normal rotational speeds are at any rate, insanely fast if I recall right, around whatever axes the thing can rotate about.
John, John Futter and I've been talking about just such an approach. The thing about the bullet analogy is this -- they're all moving the same way and don't collide with one another doing that!
(which is also the problem with a thermal velocity vector distribution, a lot of the energy you put in doesn't create collisions -- so I'm an a-thermal kinda guy)
However, there is a possibility of using something like silicon as a "funnel" at which you shoot "shotguns" from both sides. In his business (implantation etc for the government in New Zealand) it's a problem as things go much deeper in one of the xtal orientations -- it's like looking down a row of bundled tubings. So to implant to some desired depth, they have to watch that.
That's kind of a sneaky trick to get to better effective luminosity for sure, which is definitely part of the game here. Else I work with space-time bunching. Space with short focal length optics so space charge doesn't blow up beams, and time bunching for the same reason. The luminosity only has to be high right at the collision point in space-time. Elsewhere, you let the beam spread out or you can't control it anyway. Despite my initials, I don't think a DC fusor will ever fly.
By the way, if you compute the sizes of things, shooting say protons at say a Li target, you are shooting at golf balls 1/3 mile apart from an airplane, with a shotgun -- most of your bullets miss.
However, I actually own guns that can be that accurate easily (I hold some decent all time records doing that), even with wind blowing, barrel vibrations, ammo that is not perfectly all the same and so on. So theoretically one should actually be able to do it better in this case -- atoms are all alike (if it's all the same type of atom) and a cold crystal target, once you know where 3 are, you know where they all are over some range of distance before inevitable motions spoil the coherence. Think of using something similar to an old CRT shadowmask, then focusing an image of that down onto the target -- you do direction selection only on ions going the right way already, and only accelerate (eg invest big energy in) ones that might hit something, rather than wasting all that "powder and lead" with a shotgun shooting from the sky. When I ran the numbers on that, it looked like it could scale to about 10kw output -- with a lot of if's -- like if you can make the shadow mask and optics accurately enough. That's one heck of a small implied hole size to spacing ratio! But R Crewe in his electron microscope work, actually was able to focus a beam well enough to see uranium atoms on a substrate as fuzzy balls -- you aim for the center. Protons or deuterons should be easier to focus better (shorter wavelength).
Too bad he did this fine work just before the scanning tunneling microscope came along and stole his thunder, but I have his papers.
My thinking (and also Curtis Faith, who you should have join your board, he's doing a maybe-credible TOE right now) is that there just has to be some difference in reaction/tunneling rates depending on the relative orientation of the nuclei when they get close -- for example, if it was already closely aligned to the the way He would look, the favored reaction would be to go to He, perhaps, and one sort or another of the other orientations would favor one of the other more common reactions, just as a minimum-effort type of thing -- it will do what's easier to do. In other words, if one of the nuclei had to make a 180 degree flip or spin the other way, it won't do that -- it will do one of the reactions where that doesn't matter instead of the one I want.
And of course, I personally am into the idea of getting useful energy out, and not so much neutrons...which gives me two out of 3 shots in the case of DD.
Obviously, there is something going on in the DT reaction that makes it "can't miss" compared to this, which might be a clue of some sort.
Could be they're going to always hit neutrons-first, though, due to Coulomb forces as they approach....those get real strong in proximity to the event. Curtis thinks we might be able to manage rotations to get them to glance this way or that anyway, I don't have the math for that or for the wave functions rolling off the tip of my tongue though. I doubt anyone here does.
And you're not wasting my time to any greater extent than it is already. I've been reading your board too, and instigating a little over there. Let me know if it's too much...
You think that Martin Braun guy is any good? He sure is a teaser and we've had bad luck with those here and elsewhere sometimes -- they always claim to know everything, but never come out with it, and they really do waste time. He's easy to get going, for sure! Email me if you want. I'm trying to get with that paper over there that talks about
energy equivalence and see if I can figure out what he's getting at. I've often wondered about the kind of thing where possibly a De Broglie and a Schrödinger wave set might resonate together between two entities....which would have applicability here to cross sections and how to manipulate them.
As far as I know, that's a completely un looked at field -- things that affect cross sections. We just measure them. It seems we have enough theory, if really worked out, already, to look at that, but no one does it
who can. Low hanging fruit? Hope springs eternal!