Animations

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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Apr 29, 2011 9:21 am

Right, so a self -aligning type beam would be worst -- everything the same way, and that's what my experiments seem to show (although not testing for that explicitly or exclusively) -- leaving it alone gives the worst results.
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Re: Animations

Postby JonathanH13 » Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:53 am

Coming from at this from another direction is not how we would like to control things, but what are the known methods of control (manipulation of charged particles) - that narrows down our options and grounds any designs pragmatically.

It has to be electric fields, magnetic fields and beams of photons or electrons. That covers most the options I can think of offhand. The deuterons need to be highly focused and synchronised as a minimum requirement, and then perhaps we can move towards more difficult ideas such as orientation.
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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Apr 29, 2011 2:06 pm

We obviously should come at this from all directions, and surround it so it has to surrender!

Yes, we have to work within the realm of the do-able for sure and certain. However, we also don't want to be the guy looking for his car keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is, even though we dropped them in the alley. In that case, the looking under the light is do-able, but not likely to find the keys in the alley.

The point of course being, no matter how well you refine your aim and your bunching, if you're trying to get something to happen that would cheat some conservation law, it's not going to happen. So we do have to come from all sides here. Sure, orientation may only be a minor thing, and might be pretty hard to get -- or easy, we don't know yet because we've not tried it, and the gist of the thread so far is "what should we be thinking about trying".

I do agree that at some point that has to be limited to the things we actually can try, of course. And yes, there's only some things we can turn the knobs on, and those all involve the EM long range forces as far as I know. We can't do the rest with any current tech I'm aware of. A long range strong-force transmitter would really be ground breaking!

My thinking is that yes, we can only do preparation of our reactants via EM kinds of things, and simply hope to set up a situation such that when the shorter range forces take over, everything is optimal for them to do as we wish. This may not be as limiting as some would think. We can polarize things with magnetism, taking advantge of any moment they have in that domain. We can impart angular momentum with circularly polarized photons -- assuming the frequencies required are those we can generate. And at the currents required for lab scale tests, we can surely aim and bunch almost to our hearts content -- I calculated 10pa as being the required rate to get there if the interaction rate is high, and that's a real easy number to deal with -- you can just about ignore complications like space charge repulsion and beam spreading at those levels.

My approach here is to eat our way in from both ends -- we have to have the theory worked to a certain extent, or we'd be trying to force nature to do something it just won't do, no matter how hard we try. But we also have to work within the realm of the possible -- point well taken. Up till this point, things like the selection and conservation rules have simply been ignored in the fusor community, and I was attempting to rectify that lack, because obviously they are going to be important -- and it looks like we're making at least a bit of progress there.

As an iterative process, we can now look at things like "now we know what we want to do, but can we do it, and if so, how" -- and maybe with a side dish of what the side effects and artifacts of the chosen "how" are. All these things seem to be to have to be done in tandem, kind of like a software design where nothing works until it all works, rather than sort of blindly working our way into each feature incrementally, only to find our original design makes adding that crucial feature very difficult. In our work in that area, we always supplemented our top down work with some small tests going bottom up. If we were going to do, say, VOIP, we could do an elegant top down software design only after we understood what TCP/IP and UDP could give us to work with from the bottom up, for example. because it would have been easy to create a pretty design that would have been hell to implement if we didn't know that stuff going in.

At some level, I do have an existence-proof that this is possible, from data already taken here, with technique that is obviously available, as it's already established fact that some of these phenomena have already occurred in the lab, purely by accident. I realize that since it only happened here with the local group having seen it with their own eyes, that this hasn't sunk in for everyone yet -- nor should it till someone else duplicates it, and that's hard in this environment as everyone is doing whatever it is they do, and can't spare the time and effort necessarily to go and dupe what I've already done, and won't if they think they're hot on the trail of their own vision.

What I'd propose at this point is to dramatically simplify the testing system, rather than use a plain fusor here. The fusor was able to show that some interesting and unexpected things can happen, but despite the apparent simplicity, is actually pretty complex in terms of what's going on in that soup, both in bulk and in detail. I'd prefer to investigate this in a system that lets us tweak one thing at a time more easily, rather than depend on emergent behavior in bulk, certainly. This made the fusor a way to "try everything all at once in a poorly controlled fashion". That showed some interesting things that should now be chased down under more controlled (and controllable) conditions. In short, I'm with you here.

So a simpler beam on beam or beam on target approach, where each aspect can be separately varied seems to be the thing called for to look at some of this, even though the apparatus would be more complex than the old "put a grid in a controlled atmosphere, push in some power, and see what happens" rig, as those with fusors have now.

I'm kind of fond of the idea of building one of these as a test platform. Bought the tooling, just haven't gotten around to building one yet. The flexibility of this would allow us to add any sort of focusing, bunching, twisting, whatever, to it and try things on a small lab scale.

electrostatic ion storage ring.pdf
Tabletop Electrostatic storage ring
(935.86 KiB) Downloaded 511 times


For some unknown reason, the Accelerator directory in our online library keeps disappearing from general access -- perhaps some of the ISP software doesn't like that name, I'll look into it, but here's the relevant paper at any rate. The attraction of this design is that there is no reason you couldn't have bunches of ions counter rotate in it, rather than having to build two rings and have them intersect, and of course, it can be made small enough to fit through a 6" door in a system (and the prototype shown here is that size).

I really need to get all those papers back viewable -- it's a lot of good stuff including whole books on the things one can do with particles in beams, done by beamline experts, not just the "conceptually trivial" guys, but people who've actually done it. I'll post if I get it all working again, but till then, here's the paper inline. I can't do that with the books due to the board attachment size limits...I'll try and see what the FTP shows me now, last time it had mysteriously re-attributed itself to be invisible, I fixed it, and now it's happened again. That's one huge directory of good stuff to lose, and I didn't notice till now because of course, I have local copies of it all to look at.

And here's another one that came before the ring thing, less complex but also less versatile.
ConeTrap.pdf
Cone trap
(1.47 MiB) Downloaded 517 times


Ah, here we go, here's the link to that stuff in general. Humphries has some good stuff in there, but it's too large to attach to a post.
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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue May 10, 2011 10:17 am

These guys are able to polarize particles in a beam, it's probably not that hard to do. I'll look into how they're doing it.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-tool-proton.html

A little more looking lead me here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance

Which in section 2.1 says that the spins within a D are aligned. This would indicate that you can't stick two same-alignment D's together into an He without violating Pauli, they'd have to be oppositely polarized so you'd have one each spin up and spin down nucleon of each type. The treatment here leaves out how you'd accomplish polarizing a spin-1 D, however (vs spin 1/2 protons, which appears to be easy). Jon's knowledge of NMR might just come in handy!
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Re: Animations

Postby chrismb » Tue May 10, 2011 1:21 pm

Doug, I will repeat that deuterons are bosons. Pauli exclusion principle doesn't apply to integer-spin particles. Deuterons are 1+.
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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue May 10, 2011 1:41 pm

Right, I know this. However, that's not the point I'm trying to make -- we're talking past each other on the level we're viewing this from. The point is that two D's can't become an He unless they go in with opposite spins, or Pauli won't let the He form at all -- because then you'd have two each protons and neutrons with identical spins in the same nucleus -- two Pauli violations at once.

I'm not thinking about the D's as D's, just a source of protons and neutrons to react into the product, prepackaged as D's. Those DO follow the Pauli principle, and somehow you have to get from there to here. And D's are one -- and can be plus or minus, which is the point. Needs one of each to make He.

Within a D both p and n can have the same spin, and usually do, as that doesn't violate the principle, and gives lowest energy for a D by itself. But if you're trying to assemble an He -- it suddenly matters a lot -- things have to be conserved, at least from what I'm reading.

This alone would explain the rarity of that pathway compared to the other two DD reactions I think. Particularly in any case where there's any "self aligning" going on -- you're probably right that this happens in a conventional fusor and most other things, unless measures are taken to get the conditions you specifically want.
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Re: Animations

Postby chrismb » Tue May 10, 2011 3:13 pm

OK. I see [- I think?!]. Well, maybe it's helped my understanding of what you are thiniking about, at least. You are asking a question about the possible states of configuration that the collective nucleons of both deuterons might have to undergo as they 'transition' to the excited 4He state?
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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed May 11, 2011 8:58 am

Now we're getting close on this one. Yes, there appears to be no way that you can combine two spin up protons and two spin up neutrons and get an He, which has one each spin up and spin down of each thing -- somewhere along the line you'd have to violate Pauli twice, which seems kind of unlikely of accomplishment. You can align and flip spins with magnetism (that I know of -- is there another way?) but it seems likely that any magnetism normally present here wouldn't do that for you. I'd suppose there is a little (but haven't computed it) due to the charges moving (by definition), but it would seem not to be aligned right to accomplish this with what you have in a normal fusor, or for that matter a beam->target device. Seems to me you'd do better flipping the spins (as desired) as a preparation step on the way in. Or any other quantum number you need to massage to avoid attempting to cheat the various conservation laws -- it's not nice to cheat mother nature (and in the end, impossible, right?). Spin is just the one that popped up as obvious to me, and the easiest to manipulate(?). In my limited knowledge and understanding, there might be more things to pay attention to, once we understand them. Basically my thinking is that all the conservation laws have to be satisfied (or else we're onto some other new physics, which would be just as good in its own way).

I am looking at the He case non-exclusively here, just using it as the simplest (best?) example. Looking into this with any success ought to provide principles that apply to other reactions and other reactants as well. The He case has special interest of course, due to the higher energy output (4x or so) and the a-neutronic nature of it. And it's just philosophically interesting. No matter what you begin with, in the low mass region, this is clearly what you want to end up with for maximum energy output (and least undesirable crud, depending on what you desire).

Normally if you start a marble at the top of a hill, it rolls to the bottom -- all the way (to He in our case). But in the more common reactions, it's as though there was a dip partway down that tends to catch the marble and leave energy "on the table" in the form of the lightly bound T or 3He products. I want it all -- I'm greedy, and too lazy to re-react those if I don't absolutely have to. 4x isn't going to get to gain, of course, but it would seem that better understanding can't hurt that quest, either. For all we know now, having things "set up just so" may increase the probability of tunneling into fusion for a given time-distance at the barrier, and therefore increase the effective cross sections over random alignments of the various things. I would guess so, but it's only a guess that seems worth checking and chasing down, because not only have I never seen it done, but I've also never seen anything that says it can't be done. It's just a "no one has tried" situation, as far as I can tell. And we have all this other established science that seems to provide a bit of explanation -- I prefer that to thinking we can just ignore "the rules" and have it work anyway.

As Joe pointed out -- why does radioactive decay put out 4He, and never a T or a 3He (and very rarely, anything else?) {and ignoring other decay mechanisms for the moment, like beta and gamma which "work different"}. It's obvious that things "want" to be He, if it's possible - and even carbon and oxygen are made of He's and are common because of that. It would seem a lot easier to satisfy this in larger nuclei, simply because there's a big availability of nucleons already in the right states there, that we don't have here - so in the heavy atom case, there will by chance be the right configurations all the time that will tend to "get together" since they "fit" -- and the constant intra nucleus jiggling ensures that the right things can easily "find" one another, and they are already in proximity, being bound in the larger "host" nucleus. It seems that with the lighter stuff we're trying to fuse, that there's less randomness to select from, so we have to put our hand in there and diddle things instead. Or at least, that's my present working hypothesis, and one that's not going to be terribly easy to test either. Since we don't get tons of encounters with all possible combinations of states for free in our setups like inside a high Z atom -- we have to help things along.

But I also must assume that all the really easy stuff has already been tested (deliberately or otherwise), and none of it has worked, or we'd not be here talking about this -- we'd be living in a post-practical-fusion powered world, and be interested in something else fun. So, it's either going to be something more subtle like this -- or it's just impossible, which I'd prefer wasn't the case, of course. Seems obvious to me that it would take something clever to get this going, or the sun would have gone up in a bright flash long since, or you'd see huge bursts when things just happened to be aligned right in there (there are quite a large number of coin flips going on so to speak, so there should be some runs of "all heads" in the series), but instead, with just heat, compression, and randomness is actually a much lower fusion density than my fusor which adds only very slight cleverness compared to a star.

So rather than radical thinking - I'm just following a path going in the same direction as what's already been shown effective, more or less. The fusor adds a slight cleverness to random-thermal, and that helped -- a lot -- so, why not look for how to add a little more along those lines? Given we know there are all these conservation of quantum numbers laws already, and that we're not doing anything to help satisfy them to get what we want just seems obvious (now, anyway). Anyone who thinks I'm doing radical thinking with this isn't understanding what I'm trying to say (which could be my fault as I'm dimly groping for something I barely understand at the gut level here).
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Re: Animations

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed May 11, 2011 9:54 am

I want to add:

Jon's little injection of some practical reality plays very well with this line of thinking. We can't fool with strong (or any other short range force) directly with what we know. But we can play with things like spin, orientation, luminosity, aim, precision, gross rotations and phase thereof, so as to have it all "just so" when the strong force takes over on our one chance per ion pair of a reaction. Yeah, I'm not assuming we get free "recirculation with little loss" because I've not been able to measure that in my setup at all, so far. Yours may do that when you get it going, but mine doesn't enough to be easily measurable. So I see both approaches as good possibilities -- yours that gives them a lot of tries, and mine that make things more likely to work on the first try. Either could get us partway there, and I see no obvious reason they couldn't be combined later.
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