The EVO crater — two accounts, one micrograph

Why the library suggests it

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).