On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here, you’re going into the hot fusion area by doing plasma compression. > Come to think of it, they do this kind of stuff in the Polywell hot fusion > reactor. They don’t get much reverse beta decay in that system. > Axil, a sub-micrometer sized Polywell reactor is an interesting possibility. To recap, a Polywell reactor creates a virtual negative cathode by confining electrons in a potential well at the center of a set of powerful magnets. The electrons attract positively charged ions so strongly that the rate of fusion becomes significant. We can imagine a Polywell reactor of a similar but different sort inside a closed cavity in a metal substrate. The basic gist of it is this -- a gamma enters the cavity somehow, and through Compton scattering, electrons on the walls of the cavity and bound to the hydrogen confined within it dissociate and become free. Assume a rate of Compton scattering that is sufficient to prevent deionization as the photon or photons reverberate within the cavity. The dissociated electrons now occupy the space in the middle of the cavity. The cavity need not be so narrow that it allows only single nuclei, end-on-end; perhaps it's large enough to accommodate a substantial volume of hydrogen ions and to allow them to move around. Because the hydrogen-1 or hydrogen-2 nuclei have been ionized, they are strongly repelled from the ionized nickel walls and are attracted to the electrons occupying the area in the middle. This leads them to come within a close enough distance to one another at the center of the cavity that the probability of fusion goes up (how far up, I have no idea). In order for anything like this to be feasible, it must be possible for a gamma ray or an x-ray to reverberate within a nickel cavity (allowing for incremental downshifts in wavelength as Compton scattering proceeds -- i.e., it's not really a single photon we're talking about). According to the following abstract, while the refractive index of x-rays tends to zero with increasing energy, that of gammas becomes significant with yet higher energies: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i18/e184802. The article from which I got that reference says that "researchers now believe that by replacing the silicon prisms with higher refracting materials like gold, they can bring refraction [of gamma rays] up to a level where it can realistically be manipulated for optical techniques." I read this to mean that there is a possibility that gammas can behave similarly to light at much lower wavelengths under the right conditions and at the right energies. Another question is how long it would take before a gamma would shift into the x-ray or ultraviolet part of the spectrum; if it transferred energy to the environment too quickly, I suppose deionization might start to take place. Eric
