Historical research guide · 0872 · 2012

Specially Conditioned EM Fields to Reduce Nuclear Fusion Input Energy Needs

H. David Froning Jr. · Terence W. Barrett · George H. Miley

In one minute

Two positive nuclei push each other apart, and every fusion machine ever built spends most of its input energy overcoming that push. H. David Froning, Terence Barrett and George Miley ask whether the push itself can be changed by the shape of the electromagnetic field the nuclei sit in. Their argument runs through gauge symmetry — the mathematical structure that decides how a field behaves. Ordinary electromagnetism has the simplest such structure, and its angular momentum behaves like that of spin-one particles, which is why like charges repel. The fields that carry the short-range weak nuclear force inside a nucleus have a richer structure, and their angular momentum behaves like that of spin-two particles, for which like charges attract. Barrett has shown how to derive electromagnetic fields carrying that same richer structure. This paper takes one specific way of conditioning ordinary field energy into that form, assumes a particular fusion reaction, and makes the first parametric estimates of how much input electrical energy it could save.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about opening the fusion door from the field side rather than by brute heat and pressure, and this paper is one of the clearest statements of the idea in the peer-reviewed literature: condition the field, and the barrier the fuel ions face is no longer a fixed quantity. Chapter 10 gets Barrett’s work named at its source — the extension of Maxwell theory to a higher gauge symmetry is the same mathematics the site’s vector-potential chapter runs on. Chapter 6 gets the payoff stated in the right units: not free energy, but a smaller electrical bill on the input side of a reactor that still burns fuel.

From the source

Ordinary electromagnetic fields possess relatively simple U(1) gauge symmetry, and their angular momentum is analogous to that of spin-one particles. What this manifests as is the everyday behaviour of charge: Coulomb repulsion between free electrons or between free ions, and Coulomb attraction between free electrons and ions.Abstract, first and second sentences
By contrast, the angular momentum of the SU(2) fields that describe the short-range weak nuclear force in atomic nuclei is analogous to that of spin-two particles, whose like charges attract. Free ions that enter such small SU(2) field regions therefore attract each other until their separation becomes so small that their fusion occurs.Abstract, third and fourth sentences
Barrett has derived electromagnetic fields carrying the same SU(2) gauge symmetry and the same spin-two angular momentum as the SU(2) matter fields inside atomic nuclei — that is, an electromagnetic field can be given the structure of the field that binds rather than the field that repels.Abstract, fifth sentence
It is conceivable, therefore, that SU(2) electromagnetic fields might cause fuel ions inside nuclear fusion reactors to attract rather than repel each other, so that the electrical compression energy those fields must exert on the fuel ions before fusion occurs is reduced.Abstract, sixth and seventh sentences
The paper does the first quantitative pass on that possibility: a specific conditioning of U(1) electromagnetic field energy into SU(2) electromagnetic field energy was selected, a given type of fusion was assumed, and preliminary parametric estimates of the input electrical energy reductions were made. What would settle it is an experiment that conditions a field this way and measures the reaction rate against an unconditioned control.Abstract, closing sentence

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phpro.2012.08.013

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

WHY ABSTRACT-ONLY. This is a retrieval limitation, not a licence one. The publisher’s own Crossref deposit records two licences for this DOI: an Elsevier text-and-data-mining user licence for the accepted version, and creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 for the version of record, effective 16 July 2013; Unpaywall and OpenAlex both report the article as open access under CC BY-NC-ND. The article is free to read at the publisher. However, the publisher’s servers decline every automated retrieval route tried — the article page, both PDF endpoints, the DOI resolver target and the aggregator mirror all return an access-denied page, and the page markup carries an explicit text-and-data-mining reservation — so no Creative Commons statement could be confirmed inside the article itself and no cleaned full text could be produced. This sheet therefore carries the summary, the claims and the authors’ own abstract, and sends the reader to the source for the text. The abstract below is the publisher-supplied abstract as deposited and indexed; five hyphenation artefacts introduced in indexing are repaired — U(1) gauge, spin-1, like charges, short-range and spin-2 — and nothing else is altered. One clause in the deposited copy, that spin-one particles are those whose like charges attract and unlike charges repel, is immediately followed by the sentence stating Coulomb repulsion between free electrons or ions, so the two halves of that clause appear transposed somewhere between the paper and the index; it is reproduced here exactly as deposited rather than corrected, and the claims below are drawn from the sentences that are unambiguous. PUBLICATION. Published as H. David Froning Jr., Terence W. Barrett and George H. Miley, Physics Procedia 38 (2012), pages 77 to 86, in the proceedings of the Space, Propulsion and Energy Sciences International Forum, SPESIF-2012. Crossref gives the first author’s name as H. David Froning Jr.; the skeleton recorded it without the suffix.

How to cite it

H. David Froning Jr., Terence W. Barrett, George H. Miley (2012) Specially Conditioned EM Fields to Reduce Nuclear Fusion Input Energy Needs doi:10.1016/j.phpro.2012.08.013

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