Recent content by Vardaan Bhat

So, to be clear, you take some deuterium, ionize it, accelerate it, and add electrons at the end? What defines the end? When it's in the plasma? Why does this work, and can it be applied to other fuels? Can it be used to ignite fusion alone (even just theoretically) or does it need to be...

How do you make controlled beams of a neutral particle or atom?

Wow! Thank you for the graph. That helps me visualize the problems with my idea. What kinds of fast particles?

What other kind of em is used for fusion? With icf, why can't we just shoot X-rays with soft X-ray light at the fuel?

If they're higher energy, I'd imagine you'd need less and the setup would be more compact.

... gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation, no?

How can one "heat up plasma as a whole" in general?

I'm a bit confused by that analogy; if we produce antimatter, we can never have energy positive annihilation because producing the antimatter will take as much energy or more than that which is released by annihilation. On the other hand, if we spend a little energy producing a tiny amount of...

@rootone I understand, I was proposing that positron annihilation could release gamma rays and energize fuel. Apparently that idea is quite impractical, but I'm wondering now about antimatter in general.

I'm beginning to understand that this idea is impractical, thanks for being patient. That being said, would it be possible to use antimatter in general to catalyze a fusion reaction? Not necessarily positrons, perhaps antiprotons. The ones I've read about use radioisotopes of some sort and...

Still, aren't the resulting gamma rays very high energy and capable of energizing and ionizing fuel? If you had access to a lot of positrons, hypothetically speaking, couldn't you release enough energy to ignite fusion? If you want the rays to meet the fuel, could you get rid of the capsule and...

Not sure, it just seemed to me like the tremendous amount of energy released by antimatter annihilation could have uses in fusion catalyzation; most people have proposed antiproton use but they're even more difficult to make than positrons, so there's that. I read about Positron Dynamics, who...

Apparently at high velocities positrons can be useful for generating muon pairs. Could muon catalyzed fusion using high energy positrons be a viable alternative? Also, you said one must heat up the electrons to heat up the nuclei. Why is this? Thanks! Why doesn't the tennis ball analogy apply...

I don't understand. Where did you get the 1ev value? Wikipedia states that 66 kev is necessary for dt fusion, and the gamma rays produced by annihilation have at least 511 kev of energy. I don't fully understand why these rays can't be used to heat up nuclei. A second, separate question. What if...

Hold on -- are you saying that if you had enough/enough energy gamma rays , you could theoretically compress plasma and cause fusion? Let's just suppose we had access to a bunch of positrons and didn't care about the efficiency for a moment (as a hypothetical), -- how many gamma rays/what energy...