X-Message-Number: 21872 From: Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 06:50:53 EDT Subject: Pumping a nuclear X-rays laser. --part1_139.20962b67.2c0f290d_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Nuclear x-ray laser: This tool looks somewhat "Star War," it is an element of the quantum nondemolition x-ray scanner. A laser works by pumping a majority of atoms in an excited state and then let them decay to the ground state by stimulated emission. The classical scheme is to pump an electron from the ground state to some higher state able to decay to a nearby metastable excited state. The laser emission is produced between the metastable and the ground state. The problem with high energy radiation such x-rays is that the state stability is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the energy. There is then no time to pump a majority of atoms in a given excited state. Only gigantic pulsed lasers or nuclear explosions can do the job in the x-ray waveband. Even worst, because of the fast decay mode, the emission takes in a broad band, this translates into a short wave packet, unsuitable for QND interferometer. There seems to be no solution with the linear electromagnetic structure of atoms. The way out is to use nuclear levels of protons in the nucleus. Because protons react to the strong nuclear force, their electromagnetic energy levels are strongly distorted and non linear. There are many long lived metastable levels suitable for an interferometer. Pumping them without nuclear reactions is not seen as an option by most physicists because the x-ray source would have to be a very narrow band one. My opinion is that this can be done with entangled states. My starting point is a 3 GHz generator coupled to a storage superconducing cavity the discharge is done with a mercury contactor, the pulse rising time is 3 ns with this device. The wave is produced in an elliptical polarization state. It is then feed between two flat mirrors so as to get entangled in the vertical polarization state. Taking as reference the sodium double line, each mirror is polished to one-tenth of wavelength so the slit between them is defined at one-fifth of wavelength or near 0.1 micrometer. This define the scale of first quantification entanglement. It is one million smaller than the original radio wavelength, so we have entangled on the order of one million radio photons. Next, the wave goes throughout a second flat mirror pair producing a new entanglement in the horizontal polarization. The number of photons in the original pulse is assumed to be infinite to simplify. So, each photon in a vertical entanglement will be entangled in the perpendicular plane with others coming from different entanglement bunches. So, at the exit one million of vertical entanglement bunches will be horizontally entangled. For a tilted linear polarization, there will be one trillion 3 GHz entangled photons with a collective energy near 10 MeV. I recall that the target x-ray laser beam is in the 5 - 10 KeV range, so there is some margin. At the superconducing cavity exit there would be a delay line to keep the radio spectrum under some MHz wide. This spectrum would have a width one-thousandth of the main frequency. In the entangled bunch, this relative frequency dispersion is reduced by a factor equal to the square root of the photon number. With one trillion photons, the relative narrowness get better by a factor of one million. The wave packet is then 100,000 km long and fits well with nuclear energy levels. The real concern at this level is not: Could this be done but: Would someone with garage level technology be able to do it? The kW class 3 GHz radio generator is on the market at affordable price. A niobium superconducing cavity, with high quality chemical polishing and liquid helium cryostat, could be bought at high price. I think an alternative would be to buy a sheet of beryllium and cool it down to LN2 temperature so its conductivity would be some hundred times better than room temperature cooper. It would be sufficient for that application, so the superconductivity device could be seen as an overkill. High speed mercury contactor is in stock, no problem. The four mirrors could be cut from a single standard Pyrex slab, I can fit 3 flat polishing posts on my large mirror polisher (two weeks work). The one-tenth of wavelength precision is not out of reach: many amateur telescope makers get down to 1/20th wave. One problem is that the entangled wave gets out of the mirrors slit as light from an optical fiber: it spray in all directions. A lens concentrator must be added, it could be a graphite concave lens (x-rays have negative refraction index with many materials, so a concave lens concentrate them). The high lens curvature needs a special polishing machine to be implemented, something similar to what is used for Maksutov's telescope correcting lens making. To conclude, I think a nuclear x-ray laser pumped by entangled radio waves is a workable option for advanced amateur experimentalist. Yvan Bozzonetti. --part1_139.20962b67.2c0f290d_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21872