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Electron's magnetic moment in plasma/fusion physics?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 5:44 am
by jarek
We usually look at electron as just a charged point, while it has also strong magnetic moment. Papers from good journals of Polish physicist (Gryzinski) who worked on plasma for half a century strongly suggest that this magnetic moment is also extremely important - I'm trying to find some information about it, but it looks completely forgotten. Maybe I could find some on this forum?

Magnetic moment means that electron is also a tiny magnet, so imagine there is e.g. proton in this magnetic field: if we change coordinates such that electron stops for a moment, now proton is moving in magnetic field and because of 3rd Newton's law, created Lorentz force also affects electron.
So there is some kind of dual Lorentz force - not only moving charge is affected by magnetic field, but also moving magnetic dipole by electric field.
It for example allowed him to calculate classical electron-proton scattering approximations having very good agreement with experiment (1959) - these papers have hundreds of citings and I haven't found any nonpositive.

I think its most important consequence for fusion physics would be that for some parameters, electron falling into nucleus can scatter in exactly opposite direction - so it can literally bounce between two nuclei, screening their Coulomb repulsion, especially if one nucleus is proton/D/T.
It means that electron could really help crossing the Coulomb barrier for fusion and it should finally obtain some part of released energy (beta radiation) - Gryzinski quickly became enthusiast of electron assisted fusion, Nature published his explanatory note a month after P&F cold fusion announcement.

Here are gathered some of his papers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-fall_atomic_model

Is electron's magnetic moment important/considered in recent plasma, fusion physics?
Can electrons help crossing Coulomb barrier for fusion?

Re: Electron's magnetic moment in plasma/fusion physics?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 8:04 am
by Giorgio
jarek wrote:Can electrons help crossing Coulomb barrier for fusion?
That, IMHO, is a question that can hardly find a reply on any forum with the actual knowledge we have.
If Rossi e-Cat is proven to be working than the reply will probably be yes, the problem being the IF.

Re: Electron's magnetic moment in plasma/fusion physics?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 8:16 am
by rcain
jarek wrote:...Can electrons help crossing Coulomb barrier for fusion?...
that is an interesting question.

in an indirect way of course the Polywell geometry achieves just that.

but not in the way you meant i think.

i hope to find out the answer myself, by hanging around here and elsewhere. waiting for news .... unfortunately, we cannot 'talk' such things into existence ( i think), thus not much actual progress has been made, - welcome btw.

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 8:35 am
by jarek
Giorgio, I don't think it applies only to cold fusion case - here is his Science News letter from 1959 about supernovas - from his book (which unfortunately is in polish).
On 162-163 page of this book he indeed defend cold fusion, using arguments like:
- energy balance in our planet - they couldn't identify source for more than 50% of energy,
- they couldn't identify source of strange isotope composition of volcano gases - with high concentration of tritium (12 years half-life) and He3,
- in some kind of rocks there are observed localized regions with high helium concentration (also He3).
But he also write about fusion in star cores - blue text on page 163 says that energy in our star is released through sythesis of two protons with assist of electron and then small blue text on the bottom says that Eganowa analysis says that surprisingly the amount of energy generated by star decreases with increase of temperature of the core, what is consistent with his theory of electron assisted fusion (he calls it 'molecular mechanism of nuclear synthesis') (?)

rcain, thanks and welcome.
I know that polywell uses electrons for different purpose - mainly as energy carriers, but maybe their assist itself is also essential for this fusion process?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 9:05 am
by rcain
jarek wrote:... but maybe their assist itself is also essential for this fusion process?
since in Bussard Polywell, ions are fast where electrons are slow and vice versa, there might be some quantifiable effects i suppose, but it is not considered in any treatment so far as i know. ie. it is therefore also not deemed critical to success.

Other approaches such as FRC and Focus Fusion, arguably also intermediate an electron assisted phase of some sort.

as to the whole area of LENR, Oppenheimer–Phillips type process and so on, well that is topical news and debate at present - dusty papers seem to be re-emerging, in new forms, 'shameless' claims, etc... you get the picture i think. all we want is a reliable trial of experimental evidence first, any theory, would be the icing on the cake. imho.

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 9:26 am
by jarek
I don't know much about plasma physics, but it seems that hot plasma group he worked in for almost 50 years (and was its chief for almost 20 - table on 7th page of this review paper) indeed worked on some kind of Focus Fusion approach - e.g. here he writes that in 1959 they started to work on 'rod cannon' which was prototype of ion diode (15 years before USA) - here (and further) are pictures of collisions of such two plasma beams. I cannot find it now, but I think he has written that each country of Easter bloc had to have a tokamak project, but he protested that it won't work and so Polish plasma group worked on such colliding plasma beams instead, but finally while government has changed, they've lost funding and project was closed in early 90s.

About other explanations of hypothetical cold fusion, the only taken seriously I've seen seems to be so called Widom-Larsen Theory, in which protons and electrons combine into neutron to screen coulomb barrier – sounds great, but required energy for such process is 0.78MeV – it’s quite huge, thermodynamically it's completely improbable ... we could borrow it from vacuum due to Heisenberg principle, but only for about 4*10^-22s. Protons in room temperature have about 1000m/s velocity, so in this way we could only explain last attometers …

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 11:18 am
by Giorgio
jarek wrote:Giorgio, I don't think it applies only to cold fusion case -
It was not my intention to limit it to CF cases.
I merely brought the Rossi device as example of a potential way to demonstrate your statement, not as a way to limit it to Cold fusion.
Sorry if it gave that impression.

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 11:21 am
by Giorgio
jarek wrote:About other explanations of hypothetical cold fusion, the only taken seriously I've seen seems to be so called Widom-Larsen Theory, in which protons and electrons combine into neutron to screen coulomb barrier
You can join discussion here if you like:
viewtopic.php?t=3079&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=90

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 11:45 am
by jarek
I briefly looked through that discussion, but I have to admit that as I've written - I rather don't treat such explanation seriously.
About the hypothetical need of enriched nickel, there are some arguments to think about it, like:
- higher isotopes have larger radius and so the proton doesn't have to get as close,
- higher isotopes have larger neutron concentration, probably also on surface - proton should approach from such neutral directions,
- different isotopes have different magnetic moments, what could be important e.g. because of attraction of anti-parallel alignment (?).
But I don't think these reasons could be really essential - I would say that the only reason to use enriched nickel (giving about 3.5 less energy!) is safety - that if e.g. car crashes, escaped liquid wouldn't be radioactive.
In Piantelli's patent is claimed that not only it can use different isotopes, but also dozens of different elements.

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 12:28 pm
by rjaypeters
Is the following relevant? If not, please ignore.

Electron Is Surprisingly Spherical, Say Scientists Following 10-Year Study

ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature on May 25.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 131707.htm

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 12:46 pm
by jarek
This article doesn't even mention what it is really about (here is better) - finding a better limit for electron's electric dipole moment - I agree that most probably it should be zero.
But we also know that electron has spin and corresponding magnetic dipole moment - directed properties, which wouldn't allow me to tell that it's perfectly spherical.
Positive about it is admitting that it isn't just a point-wise entity, but rather a nonzero volume field configuration, but it's discussion for a different place...

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 7:51 pm
by D Tibbets
I don't remember all the properties of the electron, but it has a negative electrical charge, a dipole magnetic field, a spin, and I think a handedness(?). The chariteristics of these properties help describe how they behave, but they do not imply different behavior just because the discription is changed. The electron is susceptible to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. This limits how close it can come to a proton/ nucleus. This represents the lowest energy orbital of the electron (closest to the nucleus, and I assume this applies to an electron on a hyperbolic course past a nucleus). This distance is relatively far from the nucleus compared to the close approach protons have to make in order for the strong force to overcome Coulomb repulsion. The electrons don't help much in this regard as they are limited to distances considerably outside this radius.
The story is different with Muons. How the metal crystal lattice in LENR situations could lead to conditions where the Pauli Exclusion Principle is mitigated so that there can be increased electron shielding is a hypothesis that is persued in in LENR circles.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle can be overcome, but only with considerable energies generally beyond any gain from fusion (?). An example of where this occurs is in the degenerate matter of a White Dwarf star, and even further compression is possible if the neutron star condition is reached. And then there are black holes...
How can gravity overcome these nuclear forces and other forces? It is because gravity while the weakest force, can accumulate to such a small dense package, that it overcomes all other forces with the possible exception of matter- antimatter annialation.

Dan Tibbets

Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 6:26 pm
by jarek
In vacuum the only remaining interactions are electromagnetism and gravity, so as long we are not interested in precise field configuration very near the center of electron, it should be completely enough to consider only essential effective parameters (moments) - mass (monopole), electric (monopole) charge and magnetic (dipole) moment. In our current knowledge the other moments are practically 0.
The electron is susceptible to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. This limits how close it can come to a proton/ nucleus.
To prevent electrons from getting close to each other we don't need any exclusion principle - Coulomb repulsion is completely enough.
But generally these obstacles doesn't prevent high energetic electrons to join with proton or that in ground Schroedinger's orbital, electrons can get as close nucleus as we would like with nonzero probability.

The real question is if there is possible situation that electron accelerate toward one nucleus because of Coulomb attraction, scatters on it and then is caught by attraction of the second nucleus ... and so on (remain in their molecular orbital).
In such case it could usually be between these two nuclei - attracting both of them toward each other - making fusion easier.
For example if electron would be very near proton, it would completely screen its charge and so Coulomb barrier for fusion would disappear (Widom-Larsen theory).
Having hundreds of citings scattering theory of Gryzinski suggests that such localization of electron between two nuclei is reasonable scenario.

Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 7:03 pm
by chrismb
jarek wrote:This article doesn't even mention what it is really about (here is better) - finding a better limit for electron's electric dipole moment .
Ah! So they use that well-known, readily available compound ytterbium monofluoride for generating electrons! Of course! :roll: (Anyone know why?)

Actually, it is "really" about something deeper still - the standard model says that the electron should be perfectly round. If there were any other elementary particles then they would flit in and out of existence around the surface of the electron and make it non-round. So this is actually an experiment about the same thing as the LHC is - to find new particles to add to the standard model, for which there are some unanswered questions. The only thing is - this outcome says the standard model is right, which leaves the theorists with nowhere to go to explain the inconsistencies!

Re: Electron's magnetic moment in plasma/fusion physics?

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 3:25 pm
by jarek
Here is a simple simulator for single-electron trajectories in proton's potetnial with included Lorentz force from electron's magnetic dipole moment:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/Keple ... teraction/
Equation is in Details section.
We get analogous correction in gravitomagnetism (approximation of GR tested in Gravity Probe B: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitoelectromagnetism ) for trajectories around a pulsar or spinning black hole.
Some example trajectories:
Image

Maybe this Lorentz force could be important in polywell?