Fusion

Just to whet your appetite, here is a picture from a recent run where we did deuterium on deuterium fusion with great success. In the foreground, the blue stuff is the image on a pinhole charged particle-X ray camera we built and mounted on a wiggle stick in the tank so we could get a clue what was going on. The violet rays emanate from the fusor cylindrical grid, the focus of which is hidden by the charged particle camera; otherwise that would be the brightest dot in the picture, and the camera would have under-exposed the rest. The bright dot on the left is looking into the end of the microwave/ECR ion source we designed. The red glow in the lower left is the alumina insulation on a wire going up to the ion source to provide the ion extraction field. It seems alumina is a good red phoshpor if you bang on it hard enough with charged particles and X-Rays. Especially before you sputter titanium onto it by accident.

We decided to take a page and some learning from the world of electron vacuum devices where quite a lot of charged particle physics has been worked out to the Nthdegree and put into practice. In the fusion/plasma world we seem to be alone in this, as if all that good work had never happened. Not only is that a shameful waste, but using the techniques developed way back then, we're doing better than most others doing Farsnworth/Hirsch class fusors as a result. This picture was actually taken under less than ideal conditions for efficient fusion, since when in that mode, there's not much light lost to take a picture with. This run, however produced roughly 1.5 million neutrons per second with a mere 5 watts average input, in a pulsed mode. During that there is very little light to see in there, other than from the deliberate phosphors. The pretty rays, and in fact any photons, visible or not (most are X rays), are indications of loss, and if we could do this with no electrons or neutrals present, we probably would.

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