Timeline for Can you create a powerful magnetic field out of confined circulating electrons only?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
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| Jul 6, 2016 at 3:40 | comment | added | anna v | Just saw this. Maybe you should read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_plasma . Plasma can carry a self sustained magnetic field , the way you try to envisage with electrons. Unfortunately most google entries for magnetic cosmic plasmas are for books. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:52 | comment | added | Phyneas | Thanks, I will; I think it can work, though it may not be useful or efficient, you could even try and trap and recycle (some of) the emitted electromagnetic radiation in the electron loops. I wonder ... anyway, thanks for all of your help, I really appreciate it :) | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:51 | comment | added | DK2AX | Maybe :) But do develop that further, maybe it actually has a practical application or gives insights into electrodynamics. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:48 | comment | added | Phyneas | Earnshaw's theorem is very interesting, and you're right, it would be unstable. I wonder if you could try something like using a hydrogen plasma reinforced by the magnetic fields that it generates as the magnetic core (a sort of miniaturized tokamak, though there are size limits to that as well, I remember reading); hydrogen is diamagnetic and you could have several of these identical machines linked up with each other and in constant motion around each other. But maybe they would just repulse else other and the whole thing would break apart? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:39 | comment | added | DK2AX | It sounds like an unstable system, so a small variation in some parameter might completely collapse the whole thing. Just speculation, but judging from things like Earnshaw's Theorem, that sounds likely to me. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:36 | comment | added | Phyneas | What you say about matter is quite true, it would be far easier to do something like this with more 'machinery', though there may be upper-limit limitations to it like temperature (and its effect on magnetism, having to cool things and so on) and the field strengths you could generate (if you wanted to make it really powerful), but you are right about that. What do you think the inefficient part of it is, presuming you had really advanced knowledge of physics and the ability to construct such a mechanism, where would it actually fail do you think, is it a Lenz problem, or something else? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:29 | comment | added | DK2AX | Ok generalizing it like this, the interactions between those particles are electromagnetic anyway (pretty much), so you are in principle already only using electric and magnetic fields when you are building a classical computer. The great advantage of matter and in specific conductors is, that they put constraints on your current/charges that would be very difficult and unstable to generate with simple fields. There is probably no fundamental problem with such a mechanism, but it would certainly be highly inefficient and hard to realize. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:24 | comment | added | Phyneas | Using an external field to operate it is not a make or break condition, though it would be preferable if it were 'autonomous' and didn't require an external force, even just to do a single function. I know that it would lose energy, that's fine, I just wonder if the theory of it is at least sound. If you had nothing else to make a computer out of or were trying to imagine how the brain of an alien made only out of hydrogen might work, is it possible to use electric and magnetic fields as gears, in a sense, and representations of positions, even to hold information, or would it not work? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 21:20 | comment | added | Phyneas | Honestly I am having difficulty imagining how the setup would work myself; I am working through the kinks of it as I go. The best analogy I can come up with is bevel gears, two rotating loops perpendicular to each other, but I am not sure whether or not that would a) work, b) activate or bypass Lenz's law, or c) be the most efficient way to do it; that's why I am trying to really understand the directions of the fields, whether you should use a loop or try straight lines of current, and whether there is an advantage to bypassing magnets and just using electric currents somehow attenuated. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 20:54 | comment | added | DK2AX | I'm honestly still having some trouble imagining exactly what your setup should look like. Do you think you could make a sketch somehow to clarify this? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 20:53 | comment | added | DK2AX | Alright. If we imagine a superconducting wire loop that has a current in it, this will create a magnetic field in one direction (right-hand rule). Another loop in that field will have a current induced by Faraday's law of induction; the direction of that new current however will be such that the mag. field it's creating counteracts the already existing one from loop 1. That is Lenz's law. You'd basically end up with two loops of current, but they wouldn't stop right away, only due to dissipative effects. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 20:46 | comment | added | Phyneas | Would Lenz's law actually prevent something like this from working, I am not talking about perpetual energy or anything like that, but if it were designed properly, so that all of the magnetic fields lined up, would the 'machine' stop working, or would it just continue rotating around, losing a bit of energy of course, but not stopping immediately? Could you design it so that the induced magnetic fields keep each other going in a cycle, not gaining energy, but not losing it all either? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 11:44 | comment | added | Phyneas | I was thinking of whether or not you could in effect use a complicated series of electron loops to mimic a physical 'computer' with the preprogrammed ability to interact with an external physical situation in a predictable way, for instance if this construct was in space and it came into contact with a stray helium atom it would do xyz with it. The electron loops would regulate each other with their emitted magnetic fields to keep each other in check without an 'external' source required, or you could interact with it from outside to direct it. Just a strange idea I had :) | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 11:14 | comment | added | DK2AX | How would you manipulate those loops? You'd probably need an external field again. Also, stray fields and interaction with matter will make this very difficult | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 11:07 | comment | added | Phyneas | If I had the requisite reputation I'd upvote your answer, thanks very much for your help! I was having a strange idea where you could potentially use separate electron loops to direct and control each other free from any materials or magnets, but I'd imagine the physics and calculations of that would be extraordinarily difficult. A sort of electron clockwork that you could attenuate from the outside to generate controlled magnetic fields without requiring a physical setup. Anyway, thanks again! | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:55 | comment | added | DK2AX | Charges in a conductor follow the conductor without an external magnetic field. That is probably a great advantage. With free electrons, the only deflections would come from external electric and magnetic fields. The fields are the same of course, but it is arguably more practical to use conductors and insulators to control the flow of electrons rather than external, macroscopic fields. I dont see exactly where the advantage would be in your setup compared to a simple wire loop. | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:52 | comment | added | Phyneas | Ahh, thanks very much for the clarification on that, I can visualise it now. On a general note, is there anything inherently inefficient or implausible about the above setup versus more traditional magnetic sources (superconduction, magnetars, electromagnets et cetera)? Is there any inherent benefit to confined vs unconfined, electrons on their own versus through a medium? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:26 | comment | added | DK2AX | You can actually do a simple experiment to visualize it: get a wire, hang it up over a table in a straight horizontal line and let some current flow through. Now, place a compass underneath it. You will find that the compass does not align with the wire, but instead always points at right angles to it. You can now try to follow one of the field lines by moving the compass in the direction it's pointing (in 3 dimensions): you'll find that magnetic field lines form closed circles around the conductor. Quite the opposite of electric field lines, they start and end at charges | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:20 | history | edited | DK2AX | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added more details
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| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:17 | comment | added | Phyneas | Thanks for the reply and the information - I only mentioned the neutron star as a potential 'energy or control' source for directing the electrons; of course as you say it already has a magnetic field, I shouldn't have confused the issue. Can you describe in a bit more detail, when you say "If the electrons are flying in a straight line, the magnetic field will be concentric circles around the current" - do you mean in a spiral around the entire 'line' of electrons, or around each individual electron orthogonal to it; how could I visualise it? | |
| Mar 5, 2015 at 10:10 | history | answered | DK2AX | CC BY-SA 3.0 |