Talk-Polywell.org

Off the top of my head, I remember watching one of Indrek's animations, an electron seemed to be skiing back and forth on the mag fields near the cusp.

Is the skiing analogy an apt one? A skier can go very fast downhill, and then to scrub off speed steer in "S" turns, performing back and forth movement similar to the electron in Indrek's video.

SO do I have this right....

Hi energy electrons will tend to leave the core area (potential well), and race to the McGrid, where like the skier, they use this back and forth motion to scrub off energy. An electron returning to the potential well, a high density environment, would return in a low energy state, compared to its exit.

So is the skier the cooling mechanism ?

Kind of - the electron is spinning around the B field lines it is trapped on. As it moves into the cusp it spins faster and its forward energy is converted to rotational, so it finally reflects back. This is what ions do to make the Arora near the north or south pole - it is the same cusp action.

Collisions with other particles can slow it down, but it gains velocity falling into the grids.

The radius of the circle the particles follow is a function of their energy and B field strength.

Wave motion and surfing does happen a lot in plasmas, so it is a very apt description. It's usually a plasma phenomena rather than a particle perspective one though. But I think it's a matter of taste - all the particles affect each other, so it's hard to define which ones are "riding the wave" and which ones are "creating the wave". But the physics is pretty darn close to a surfer on a wave, so it's easier to visualize.

I was thinking of the skier as dumping speed or energy, then eventually returning to the potential well.

It's more like a pendulum - you gain speed going down to the bottom, then lose the speed back at the top on the other side.

The problem is that is a 1 dimensional analogy, and the polywell is 3D in space, 3D in electric field, 3D in magnetic field and 3D in velocity vector. Analogies help, but weirdness is normal. Which could explain physicists...

drmike wrote:Which could explain physicists...

Not quite. It would take a woman to do that.