Some Erwin guy told me that the first step is to find a cat.
Jokes aside, the strategy seems elegant, even given the physical restrictions mentioned in the intro.
First, almost all charge changes are measured to be in the positive direction—i.e., the spheres nearly always lose more electrons than protons for both the α and β decays in the decay chain
This is bugging me a bit - why would α decay increase the charge? Since you’re expelling a positively charged particle, I’d expect a decrease; and if the α particles are trapped on the silica, or steal electrons from it, you’d expect no change in charge. Perhaps the rest of the article mentions the reason (I’m still digging through it).
This is bugging me a bit - why would α decay increase the charge?
What is changing is the net charge, which refers to an excess of negative or positive charge. A neutral atom has the same number of protons as it does electrons, and so its net charge is 0. In a decay process an atom will emit, create, and/or annihilate different types of particles directly as part of the decay event, and immediately after the decay there can also be ionization events in which the excited daughter atom and even atoms around it can eject electrons (for example, via the Auger effect, emission of secondary electrons via impact ionization, and other processess).
“Energy gain in this context only compares the energy generated to the energy in the lasers, not to the total amount of energy pulled off the grid to power the system, which is much higher. Scientists estimate that commercial fusion will require reactions that generate between 30 and 100 times the energy in the lasers.”
FYI for anyone wondering, that’s a clickbait title; it’s high-temperature superconducting magnetic tape. And by high-temperature we mean:\
HTS materials operate in a range of 20 to 77 kelvins (around –200 to –250 °C). That’s still cold, but it’s much warmer than what’s needed for typical superconductors, which can only function at temperatures close to absolute zero.
But hey, even regular sticky tape is still better than a screwdriver.
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