Electrons are Hot!

This is Rather important because it  tells us that it is hot electrons that emit X rays.  And just what heats them up?  I suspected we always suspected as much but this is direct observation and surely means that the electron is absorbing radiation and then resetting the scale before it can release it.

We already know that atoms absorb radiation and then emits it as per its scale.

all this works wonderfully with cloud cosmology where an electron even looks like a radiation trap. Radiation is helpfully thought of as a mobius strip.  I wonder if this is how material absorbs heat.

Electrons are Hot!

While the LPPFusion team is still completing the control tests with tungsten electrodes, our new gamma ray spectrometer has produced important new results. In the last report, we described how the new, economical, spectrometer gave measurements of the ion beam. We then moved the spectrometer from the outside of the drift tube to in front of the main window, where it was exposed to the x-rays and gamma-rays from the plasmoid. The electrons in the plasmoid produce this radiation when they collide with the ions. The shape of the spectrum is a direct consequence of the distribution of electron energies in the plasmoid.

Only two shots have been taken so far with the spectrometer observing the plasmoid, but they produced very similar spectra. The spectra were an excellent fit to that predicted from a plasma with a 420 keV electron temperature plasma. This is even hotter than the record ion temperature we obtained back in 2016 and is the equivalent of 4.6 billion degrees K. The spectrum fits closely to a Maxwellian or thermal distribution of electrons, where the electrons are moving in a completely random way (Fig.1) . This is important, as it is a strong indication that the x-rays are produced by electrons that are confined to the plasmoid and thus have enough time to randomize, rather than produced by the electron beam, which exits the plasmoid rapidly.

Our next step is to buy one or two more spectrometers so we can simultaneously observe the gamma rays from the plasma and from the beam. That will allow us to more accurately subtract any beam contribution to the plasmoid spectra. Once we do the calculation to calibrate the beam spectra, we will be able to simultaneously measure the total beam current, plasmoid density, electron temperature and plasmoid volume. Since we already measure the ion temperature from our neutron-detecting PMTs (photomultipliers) we’ll have all plasma parameters for each shot.

Figure 1. A) Gamma rays from the plasmoid (the sum of two shots in May) are plotted as the logarithm of the gamma ray intensity vs gamma ray energy. The redline is the data averaged over 100 keV and the black line is the spectrum predicted from a 420 keV(4.6 billion K) Maxwellian (random) plasma. The black line is a good fit to the data. B) The gamma rays from the ebam of April 12th shot 2. Again the black lineis the best fit from a Maxwellian plasma. But unlike for the plasmoid spectrum, the Maxwellain line is not a good fit to the data, which has too much power aroundn 2 MeV and a sharp cutoff above 2.3 MeV, well below the spectrometer’s limit of 3 MeV. Together these spectra show that the plasmoid spectra is from a confined hot plasma, not a beam passing through a background.