Theoretical particle beam weapon

[crazymao]

This is just for fun so don't take it too seriously...

So I've read about particle beam weapons and as far as I understand its simply a concentrated beam of particles ie electrons emitted towards an object. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a big piece here when I say it (it just sound too easy) but isn't that what cathode ray tubes are? So couldn't you theoretically just build a bigger tube with a much larger power supply? Or is that the issue, that there isn't a big enough power source to do such a thing, but the idea is sound??

EDIT:
Also with what I said above in mind, theoretically, if a particle accelerator would simply release the energized particles at something (I don't know, a titanium plate), is that how a particle beam weapon would work? So are particle accelerators particle beam weapons they're just simply too big for any practical use?

 

[wizwom]

Well, to do damage, the flux and energy must be both high.
Consider a fairly cheap (a few million dollar) linear accelerator... its going to be about the size of your living room, weigh a few tons, be fairly finicky, and produce a beam power of a couple milliwatts at ~40MeV in short pulses. Since it is spewing out charged particles, if it even shot them into air, even the air would stop them in a few centimeters.

Obviously, such a machine isn't anything like ready to be a weapon, even in space. You could shoot it all day at a satellite, and there would be no effect - solar flux is actually much higher. If your aim is good, you might get some gamma damage to electronics.

So, let's move up to a huge machine, such as Jlab's superconducting linac.
Now we have a megawatt of power at 6GeV, but it costs tens of billions, and is even more finicky with cryogenic units.
If you could get the beast built in space, you'd have to power it... and that means nuclear, and then you have to have massive radiators for current nuclear technology. Such a beast would be fragile, and not really viable for a military system.

http://www.phys.vt.edu/~kimballton/gem-star/workshop/presentations/hutton.pdf goes over the current state of the art in LINACs and should give you an idea of the difficulties.

One of the advantage of high current density (a very tight beam with high power) is that it would ionize the air and literally push it out of the way, so that the beam could quickly tunnel through air to its target. Thus, attenuation would drop sharply in a fraction of a second, for a very short time (until the air thermalized at the higher temperature). But the installation size, energy needs and lack of robustness preclude military applications.

 

[surajt88]

Might be of relevance to the discussion...

As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator , the U-70 synchrotron. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms. Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when he stuck his head in the part through which the proton beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns," but did not feel any pain.

The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition, and over the next several days, started peeling off, revealing the path that the proton beam (moving near the speed of light) had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath. As it was believed that he had received far in excess of the radiation dose that would normally kill a person, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise. However, Bugorski survived and even completed his Ph.D.

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