After a week of intense work with JonH here and some really good BS sessions, I'm going to propose a new way forward for my own little lab and local group. Although the fusor ->looks<- like a simple system, what's actually going on in there is pretty complex as things evolve with emergent behavior. Of course, I will continue to have a fusor, and to add ever more diagnostics to it to find out the whichness of the why and what's really going on, in parallel with any new effort here - it's ripe for that and it would be ignorant not to, but it seems hard to figure out how to manage that hive of charged ants to get to true understanding and significant improvements with the true complexity that seems to really be going on in there. Right now, its main value seems to be a real good reliable source of a lot of neutrons, but the next step, if it's not fusor II as described elsewhere here, is going to be fairly daunting to get going, and we need some more steps, reasonably fast, if we're to get to gain while I'm here to enjoy seeing it happen.
Jon and I discussed the cone trap tabletop beam device, modified to be a collider (it's cool that you can do that with the same ring and with no magnets, most of it doesn't care which way the particles fly) at some length, looking to simplify the system for better study and more-clear results. It is attractive that way, and would fit through any of the three doors on our systems already operating for testing.
But on further thought, even more simplification seems like a good idea, with the side bonus of being even easier to get going with. And that is - simple colliding beams. Just two electrostatic accelerators (gated) firing at one another. Pretty much all the stuff to do that is "at hand" except for a few pieces that need fabbed in the shop, no big deal at this point. And to do the other thing, you need a beam to inject into it anyway -- so no matter what, not wasted effort to get up to speed on beams, focus, bunching, and gating them in an even simpler system. Once that is going, we can then look at the other things we've discussed on the board -- conservation laws, Pauli's exclusion principle, selection rules, all that -- if we can't even do that in a simple once through system, I don't see how it'd be any easier in a recirculating one -- either the Cone trap beam ring, or a plain fusor.
So I am proposing a change of direction for my own lab -- as usual, what y'all do is on you -- but I like to get input from all the smart guys here, and we are lucky that way.
Curtis suggested that head on collisions might not work as well as glancing in some cases, intuiting those selection rules without actually knowing the underlying physics himself. Well, this kind of setup would make that easy to test. Finding out we need an extra foot of beam to do things like spin alignment would be no big deal in such a system -- just insert another section of beamline in the pipes to do that.
Since Chris is already "on" the idea of making recirculation and recovery from scattering his priority and has a decent enough plan for that (and I have some ideas to add once he actually posts his details here), it seems wise for us to work on making the reaction probability per pass higher - we can always combine the two approaches after each works separately, no? That's the value of a virtual team, all free to go their own way and follow their own noses but with collaboration (without the boring meetings and bureaucratic policy impediments) or so I think.
Mark Bickey has already made me the quartz fittings for a beam on target device -- adaptable to this work right off. And I have tons more tubing we can insert into a beam line at will, with "whatever" in it to manipulate the beam -- once we learn how to make and manipulate them generally -- gating and bunching are as yet unexplored here, and need to be looked at for example.
So, y'all chime in here -- as usual, we'll all do whatever it is we want to do anyway (no way I'm even trying to herd we squirrels), but if someone has an insight, why not share it?