🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <70425@ut-emx.uucp> johncobb@ut-emx.cc.utexas.edu (John W. Cobb) writes:
[question about syncrhotron radiation limits on particle accelerators]
>
>|>Whatever the reason, is there any possibility that there exists
>|>a yet undiscovered trick around this so that one could have an SSC type
>|>acclerator (as far as particle energies are concerned) in a 1 meter box?
>|>Or is this impossible in principle, given the state of physics today.
>Well, you coudn't put a colliding ring w/ SSC type energies into a box
>with getting a great deal of radiation. So the competing effect you
>describe above would be imensely increased. You might think of doing a

This is not practical, but just for fun, suppose that the walls of the
beamline were made of some material that would form an extremely high-Q
cavity for the synchrotron radiation. Then there would be a lot of
radiation, but it would be stored in the volume of the ring. If you
could engineer the phases correctly, you could get acceleration out of
it (I'm not talking perpetual motion here --- just a case where the
acceleration from the radiation field balances the loss to particle
kinetic energy due to emitting radiation a la thermal equilibrium within a
black body) your losses now are only the absorptive losses in the walls
of the ring, but I'm assuming (ridiculously, to be sure) very high Q.

Of course, the high-Q cavity would have a narrow bandwidth compared to
the bandwidth of the emitted synchrotron radiation, but this would just
mean that the particle could not emit in certain parts of the spectrum
We already know that atoms will not radiate in below-cutoff cavities.
Kleppner and Hinds & Haroche have demonstrated this.

The problem is making a cavity with high-Q across the bandwidth of the
synchrotron radiation. There's no such thing that I know of.

---Jon

Disclaimer: The government probably disagrees with my opinions.