Introduction: Slides 1 -3:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/N31BjCK.png)
The Introduction explains why CSI is interested in simulating the polywell instead of experimenting with it.
1. It is cheaper to simulate than build.
2. It is faster to simulate than build.
3. Simulations help you understand physical effects, such as:
a. The rate of particle loss through the cusps
b. The ion temperature: center and edge
c. The electron temperature: center and edge
d. A predicted fusion rate
One thing that was not made clear was: what is the benchmark for these simulations?
Slide 2- Particle motion overview:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/h6mTAuH.png)
A typical plasma has the following characteristics:
1. 10^19 things in one cubic meter of space
2. 10,000 electron volts as an average energy
a. Is this a thermalized plasma? With a nice bell curve of energies? If so this is the plasma Devlin is describing. The electron energy distribution would look like this:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/9mrkk9h.png)
b. By the way, the likely, ideal distribution for WB-6 is shown below. This is assuming that the ions and electrons can be at different temperatures (something Dr. Rider disagreed with, he wrote an energy transfer paper that almost nobody cited). It helps to have lots of cold electrons - and a few hot ions. There are many reasons for this. First, the plasma should be mostly electrons to maintain the drop needed for fusion. Second, if the electrons are cold, it lowers the radiation losses (energy being sapped away as light). Third, if the ion population is small and hot, it drives up the fusion rate. This distribution, optimizes, the polywell.
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/CZDbEe2.png)
c. Is CSI modeling a non-thermal plasma? with energies like the following:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/oW2UOfn.png)
3. Devlin states this plasma has a collision rate of 5E+6 collisions per second. Do we have an equation to predict this?
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/XPfT6jI.png)
4. How do you handle long wave/short wave electromagnetic interactions? I imagine it is Maxwell’s equations, which explain how electromagnetic waves behave.
Slide 5: Introduction to Particle in Cell:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/uQsKV2a.png)
Instead of doing the full treatment of modeling the plasma, the Particle-in-cell method breaks the problem into two issues. This is shown below.
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/hJgmgVa.png)
Do I have that correctly? I imagine that these graphics represent data in a computer code.