Reply To: Global Warming

[asymmetric_implosion]

I will check on a step wedge reference and report back. I am familiar with the step wedge concept from my grad school days as it was included in course work.

Don’t rule out neutrons just yet. I thought the same thing initially and the little buggers ruined a week. If you consider that the neutrons are traveling at ~2E7 m/s and your chamber is something like 10 cm from the source, you have a delay of 6 ns before the neutrons hit the first wall. In your Physics of Plasma paper, you show two x-ray pulses that could be 6ns apart at the peaks. The neutrons produce an ~850 keV photon in some fraction of the reactions with the wall. That photon would give the appearance of a hard x-ray spectrum when it was really nuclear in origin. Another thought is reactions with your copper anode. We have done some calculations that suggest our hardest x-rays might be from both the anode and the chamber. More to do to confirm. A test with hydrogen would lend some insight into the problem. Just double the operating pressure to keep the mass the same as D2.

I was surprised to see the x-ray emission from the anode rim but I’ve recorded shots in most of the common PF gases and the feature is universal. I can’t speak to its absolute strength but some images I’ve collected show the rim is as bright as the base of the anode when looking down/up at the anode. I didn’t use a step wedge to look at the x-ray energy in each region.