Talk-Polywell.org

I don't think it takes much to make scientists political - they all have opinions! Non scientists should be careful what they ask for though. A lot of the financial mess was caused by good scientists doing proper math with wrong assumptions. The people asking for the work did not fully understand th...

Thanks for that pointer Mike, that's a great proof of principle they have. I'm not so sure it will apply to something like Polywell, but certainly the basic physics is all the same. They can suck energy out repetitively as the beam goes around, I'd think Polywell wants to do it in one pass. Pretty i...

I wonder if a "leaky insulator" would help prevent too much charge build up.
If you have a resistance of 100 MegOhm/square the 2 MV stand off might be
set up to leak .1 to 1 % of the total current. That would help keep the field
uniform over the whole insulator.

The pointer to the free software is a good one to save. I've seen most
of that stuff mentioned before, but never all in one place!

The instrumentation is for plasma density in more places. The ion gun can be a part of that because it is a probe for magnetic fields as well as useful for estimating density and double checking cross sections of various interactions. It's a nice tool to have in your belt, and they are lucky to be g...

Got it. It looks like a great introduction to plasmas and fusion power and it is only 2 years old, so it has a lot of references to ITER and similar experiments. Lite on the math from my perspective, but that's a good thing for most people trying to figure this out for the first time. The first part...

Howdy Vernes,

I put one up about fusion. It'll be interesting to see if fusion gets any attention over the next few years. I think it will do better than the last 20 simply because science in general is going to get some attention.

Looks like fun! I wonder how that plastic will hold up under vacuum, and just how he
intends to make a vacuum. But at least he's trying to build something!

You only need diagnostics if it _doesn't_ work. If it works, then you get neutrons. Given the amount of gas and number of neutrons detected you can figure out the compression ratio of the shock. These guys aren't looking at this as a physics experiment, they are looking at it like a business experim...

Well, crap, I saw PNL and thought of the labs in Washington. I rode my bike to work in Middleton last year - but now I'm on the east side of town!

I wish them luck. I suspect they are going to have a hard time keeping
things going, and I sure hope they are successful!

chrismb - you are thinking about individual particle motion where the forces are maximum and speeds are minimal. If it's a smooth potential and the particles are far apart, that's ok, but at high density I think the idea of "slow moving ions" just isn't going to happen. You also have the fact that e...

Nice. But I can't afford it, so I have to build it myself

Dan, This is a great way to learn physics. There are two parts to your question - one is about the force between particles and the other is about what happens when you get a lot of particles (in this case a shell). The electric force is huge. I vaguely remember a homework problem where we had to com...

So when can I read the report? Now that it has passed review, is it public
domain, company propriatary, or classified? I can understand keeping it
private for patent purposes, but it'd be great to be able to read it.

The ion currents are mostly radial, so the net current is pretty much zero. Near the MaGrid the velocity is zero, and near the center the sum of all velocities is zero, so the current is zero at those points. In between there may be a few oscillations, but the net current flow is pretty small. At le...