Historical research guide · 0053 · 2022
A Possible Heuristic Explanation of Exotic Vacuum Objects
Graham K. Hubler
In one minute
Graham Hubler of the University of Missouri takes the strangest exhibit in the plasmoid literature — Ken Shoulders’ exotic vacuum objects, or EVOs — and asks whether known physics can produce them. Shoulders, who held five patents on the devices, described micron-sized clusters carrying ten to a thousand billion electrons that punch clean holes through metal foil and liquefy a lattice with no sign of ordinary heating; read as heat alone, the damage would need a gradient above 26,000 degrees Celsius per micrometre. Hubler lines the EVO generator up against three industrial thin-film rigs — pulsed laser, pulsed electron beam and vacuum arc — and finds the difference is geometry: a very sharp cathode set close to a thin, high-quality insulator sitting on a grounded plane. He proposes the pulse forms a micro shaped charge, a two-micron slug of melted target thrown out at ten kilometres a second, the speed of the copper jet in an anti-armour munition, which bores through by plastic flow rather than by melting.
Connection
Chapter 9 has to weigh two accounts of the same crater, and this paper is the sharpest statement of the conventional one; it also names the exact modelling that would decide between them, which is what chapter 1 means by keeping a replication ledger rather than a scoreboard.
From the source
Ken Shoulders, in five patents granted in the early 1990s, described exotic vacuum objects as highly organised micron-sized clusters of electrons with soliton behaviour, at an electron population density on the order of Avogadro’s number per cubic centimetre — a typical two-micron EVO holding between a hundred billion and ten thousand billion electrons.Abstract; Section 1, quoting Shoulders
When such an object strikes solid material it performs a low-energy phase-transformation type of atomic disruption that liquefies the lattice and propels the material to high velocity with no apparent sign of conventional heating; on an ordinary thermal reading the effect would require a gradient greater than 26,000 degrees Celsius per micrometre.Abstract; Section 2, with the six-micron aluminium foil of Figure 2
Hubler’s alternative is that EVOs are not a new form of matter but a micro shaped charge: a 10 to 20 kilovolt, roughly 100 nanosecond electron pulse deposits several joules in a thin high-quality insulator, a slug about two microns across and two microns deep melts, and Coulomb explosion of the trapped charge plus the push of vaporised material expels it.Abstract; Section 2; Section 3, Summary
What separates an EVO generator from an ordinary pulsed-electron or vacuum-arc deposition rig is geometry, not physics: a very sharp cathode placed close to a thin insulating target on a conducting ground plane, fired as single pulses. The image charge induced in the ground plane holds the beam to a tight diameter, which the thick targets used for film deposition cannot do.Section 2, the bullet list following Figure 4
The expelled slug reaches about 10,000 metres per second — the same velocity as the copper jet of a shaped-charge munition, whose pressure exceeds the Hugoniot elastic limit so that armour steel is penetrated by plastic flow rather than by melting — and simulations of pulsed electron beams give electrons leaving the surface at 100,000 metres per second, dragging melted material behind them at up to 30 kilometres per second.Section 2, Figures 6 to 10
Hubler names the measurement that would settle the question: thermomechanical and electromagnetic modelling of the generator geometry, which would either reproduce the observed craters and tracks from known physics or fail to, and so validate or invalidate the micro shaped-charge picture.Section 3, closing sentence
The way in
https://jcmns.org/article/72586-a-possible-heuristic-explanation-of-exotic-vacuum-objects-evo-s-charge-clustersHow to cite it
Graham K. Hubler (2022) A Possible Heuristic Explanation of Exotic Vacuum Objects doi:10.70923/001c.72586