🚀 go-pugleaf

I think we can get some reality-checks on acoustically generated fusion
by comparing it to the results from known inertially confined fusion
results.  Specifically, I remember a few things from the Physics Today
article a few months ago about ICF.

For it to work, the DT fuel must be compressed to nearly Fermi
degeneracy.  This compression happens on timescales of a few nanoseconds,
I believe.  The central problems are (of course) the zapper technology,
and fluid instabilities in the compressing plasma fuel.

Can sonoluminesence come close to these parameters? It seems unlikely.

Now---what about that "dynamical analogue to the Casimir effect" proposed
by Schwinger.  It seems that this might play a significant role in
ICF fusion, considering the speed and violence of the process.

I gather the idea is that photons may somehow be radiated by a rapidly
compressing conductor (the plasma) changing the "eigenfunctions" of the
EM field inside, resulting in differing "zero-point" energies.  Thus,
may the ICF compression in some way extract energy from the vacuum? Or
at least use the energy generated that way in getting closer to 
the conditions needed for fusion.


It's been recently revealed that hydrogen nuclear weapons work on the
same principle (or really vice versa) as ICF.  (which means of course
that thermonuclear weapons aren't really thermonuclear at all, but
more really pyconuclear---government misinformation, I wonder)

Might this postulated Casimir effect play a big part there?  Might
hydrogen weapons get part of their energy from the vacuum?

That would be of course totally far out, but that's exactly how insiders
described the discovery by Teller & Ulam.    Hans Bethe wrote (in 1954, but
not published until 1982)
"The new concept was to me, who had been rather closely associated with
the program, about as surprising as the discovery of fission had been
in 1939.  Before 1939 scientists had a vague idea that it might
be possible to release nuclear energy in 1939, they would have worked
on anything else rather than the field which finally led to the discovery
of fission, namely radiochemistry."

It's been described as "very interesting physics".

Compressing something with radiation pressure may be pretty bold to begin
with, but would that be incredibly surprising to somebody like Hans
Bethe, who was working on the project himself?

Any back-of-the-envelope calculations, anyone?


In the same article, HB concludes with "In summary I still believe
that the development of the H-bomb is a calamity."

--
-Matt Kennel  		mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu
-Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego
-*** AD: Archive for nonlinear dynamics papers & programs: FTP to
-***     lyapunov.ucsd.edu, username "anonymous".