High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Induced Nuclear Fusion
Giorgio Fontana · Robert M. L. Baker, Jr.
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Fusion needs two nuclei close enough for the strong force to take over, and electrostatic repulsion keeps them apart. Giorgio Fontana of the University of Trento and Robert Baker of GRAVWAVE name the three known ways past that barrier — fast ions in a hot tokamak plasma, radiation-pressure compression in inertial confinement, and swapping the electron for a heavy muon — and then propose a fourth. Fire an intense, focused burst of high-frequency gravitational waves into the fuel. General relativity’s non-linear memory effect, they argue, changes the metric at the scale of a single atom, pulling the electron of a deuterium atom two hundred times closer to its nucleus; the same shaking raises the electron’s effective mass by the same factor. Either route gives you muon-catalysed fusion without the muon — and muonic hydrogen is known from experiment to fuse in picoseconds. They work the energy budget through and sketch a reactor: an X-ray laser drives a fission-based wave generator, whose focused output is aimed at synchronised clusters of fuel.
Why it matters hereChapter 12 is about making fusion happen by changing the environment the nuclei sit in rather than by heating them, and this is that idea taken to its limit: the environment being changed is the metric itself, which is chapter 4. It also puts a use on chapter 10’s high-frequency gravitational waves beyond detection and communication — driving a reaction.
What it claims
01An intense burst of high-frequency gravitational waves, focused or beamed onto a target mass of appropriate fuel, could efficiently rearrange the atomic or nuclear structure of that target with consequent nuclear fusion, including inside solid materials and at a distance from the generator.Abstract; Conclusions
Designed, not yet built02The goal is to reduce the distance between the nucleus and the electron of a hydrogen isotope, typically deuterium, by a factor of 200, which requires a metric distortion of 0.995; experiments with muonic hydrogen molecules show that at that separation fusion takes place on a picosecond timescale.Principles of HFGW Induced Fusion, opening paragraph
Designed, not yet built03Gravitational waves also raise the mass of the particles they shake, and raising the electron’s mass by a factor of 200 mimics muon-induced fusion directly; for two fuel clusters ten metres apart the amplitude required works out at 2.8 times ten to the minus sixteen.Principles of HFGW Induced Fusion, Equations 4 to 8
Designed, not yet built04The scheme avoids all three costs of the incumbent methods: the reactants need not be accelerated to high speed, no electromagnetic radiation pressure has to be pushed against fully repelling ions, and no muon has to be manufactured and then lost to its own short lifetime.Principles of HFGW Induced Fusion, the three bulleted advantages
Designed, not yet built05The calculated requirement is large — about 1.47 times ten to the twentieth joules delivered to a single hydrogen atom in one picosecond — but the authors argue it is an upper limit, since focusing along an axis affects many aligned atoms at once and shortens tunnelling times, plausibly to femtoseconds, bringing the requirement down to around ten to the seventeenth joules.Principles of HFGW Induced Fusion, after Equation 11
What to watch06The worked application is a reactor in which a picosecond ultra-high-intensity X-ray laser drives a fission generator that converts the incoming particle pulses into focused gravitational-wave pulses while preserving the timing of the wavefronts; because confinement is gravitationally symmetric near the focus, no uniform radiation pressure and no symmetric implosion geometry around the target is needed.Application Example, Figure 1
Designed, not yet built
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2437562Published as AIP Conference Proceedings 880, pages 1156 to 1162 (2007), from the Space Technology and Applications International Forum, STAIF-2007, 12 to 15 February 2007, paper 052, edited by M. S. El-Genk, under AIP copyright with no Creative Commons statement. SOURCE REACHED. The authors’ own post-review copy, headed ’After peer reviews, to be published in the Proceedings of STAIF-2007’, is free to read at gravwave.com and was read in full for this sheet; the summary and all six claims come from that reading, and the locators use the paper’s own section headings and equation numbers. The sheet stays summary-only and sends the reader to the source. Giorgio Fontana is at the University of Trento; Robert M. L. Baker, Jr. is at Transportation Sciences Corporation and GRAVWAVE LLC.
How to cite it
Giorgio Fontana, Robert M. L. Baker, Jr. (2007) High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Induced Nuclear Fusion. doi:10.1063/1.2437562
Where it sits in the curriculum
Lattice confinement fusionThe metric, warp drives and wormholesScalar waves and the field behind the fields