Section 5Plasmoids, orbs and self-organising plasma

The EVO crater — two accounts, one micrograph

University. · 2 min read

What it proposes

A granted 1991 patent family describes micrometre-scale bundles of electrons that hold themselves together, travel along grooves cut in a dielectric, and leave characteristic craters and streaks. A 2022 paper from a former Naval Research Laboratory materials physicist offers a conventional account of the same craters. Both accounts are on the record, both are specific, and the paper names the modelling that would decide between them. Doing that modelling, and taking new micrographs to a shared standard, is a clean, finite, publishable job.

Who it is forPulsed-power engineers · Materials-characterisation specialists · Hydrodynamic modellers

Why the library suggests it

The charge cluster sits in this library with a reported size and no published lifetime, so the plot lists it underneath rather than placing it on the axes. That empty column is the argument for this card.

Plasma sizes and timescales

These sources report different quantities: plasma radii, light-emitting size, confinement times and observation durations. Select an entry to see what each number describes.

Entry

The dense plasma focus plasmoidThe sheared-flow Z pinch columnNatural ball lightning, with a spectrumBall lightning seen by trained observersShoulders' charge cluster

Shoulders' charge cluster

Shoulders' patent describes charge clusters with a representative lateral size near one micrometre. Its pulse and transit times describe electrical signals or passage through a location; they do not provide a cluster-lifetime value for this display.

Lateral dimension

1 micrometre

Representative patent description, approximately

No lifetime assigned here

Intervals show reported minima and maxima. They are not uncertainty bars or probability distributions. Size and duration are shown separately; a shared row does not establish that they were measured together.

Read the sheet behind these figures

Kenneth Shoulders reports that a sharpened cathode pulsed at a couple of kilovolts throws off bundles carrying about ten to the eleventh electron charges at roughly solid-state number density, moving at about a tenth of the speed of light, stringing themselves into bead chains and closed rings (Method of and apparatus for production and manipulation of high density charge, 1991); the wider family includes a granted energy patent whose claims name a zero-point source as the outside energy input (The Shoulders EVO patent family, 1992). Graham Hubler lines the same generator up against three industrial thin-film rigs and finds the difference is geometry — a very sharp cathode set close to a thin, high-quality insulator on a grounded plane — and proposes that the pulse forms a micro shaped charge, a two-micron slug of melted target thrown out at ten kilometres a second, boring through by plastic flow rather than by melting; read as heat alone the damage would need a gradient above 26,000 degrees Celsius per micrometre (A Possible Heuristic Explanation of Exotic Vacuum Objects, 2022).

The experiment or build

Build the generator to the patent's geometry — sharp cathode, thin insulator, grounded plane — and produce craters in a target of known composition. Then run both models forward: the shaped-charge hydrodynamic simulation Hubler names, and the charge-cluster account, each predicting crater depth, lip morphology and the presence or absence of a resolidified melt layer. The settling measurement is crater depth and cross-sectional morphology against pulse energy, compared with the shaped-charge prediction, on targets of at least three different melting points. A crater whose depth follows the target's melting point is one story; a crater whose depth ignores it is the other. Isotopic and elemental mapping of the crater floor is the natural companion measurement (Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, 2022).

Research context

One side is a granted patent family with claims but few published measurements, the other is a peer-reviewed heuristic that names its own decisive test, and nobody has run it.

Take it up

The measurement that settles it: The settling measurement is crater depth and cross-sectional morphology against pulse energy, compared with the shaped-charge prediction, on targets of at least three different melting points.
What it costs to start: University.
The engineer it grows: It is also the best worked example in this programme of how to hold two rival explanations in mind at once without deciding in advance.

What it rests on