Gamma Ray Laser, possible? Superior Weapon?

Snipez

I do understand the wording of your statement. Sorry?

sophiecentaur

Woops - I meant to say "Don't you guys expect to pay for anything these days?" ( Sorry :Durr)

sophiecentaur

It would help if you avoided thinking that a little bullet (bad model of a photon) is shot out of an atom in a particular direction. All that happens is that the atom loses its energy to the passing wave because it has been stimulated to produce some energy that is coherent with the wave that's already there.

d3mm

Do you also believe Wikipedia tells you how to build a non-nuclear EMP weapon? How hard can it be to make a giant microwave? The answer is, they're still experimental after 20 or more years.

This thread touches on a lot of very "interesting" stuff in civil and military, for example, gamma ray shielding, which is an unsolved question important for long duration manned spaceflight.

SpaceX does not patent their spacerocket to prevent people reading the patent and copying it. Spacefligth stuff is protected by secrecy. Once you add military applications, it gets worse.

Someone who has worked in ths field (gamma ray weapons, and spaceship gamma shielding) is either going to remain silent or will *deliberately* provide credible sounding but false information, so you have to realise how speculative this thread is.

Addition: I'm not accusing people of writing false scientific papers, but the papers aren't the whole story.

Enthalpy

Random thoughts, corresponding to severals posts:

Free electron lasers operate in the soft X-rays up to now. If you put figures on them, it's very hard to go to the gamma with that method.

Lasers can operate without mirrors, in superradiant mode. Nitrogen lasers often do. No clean beam nor directivity.

A nuclear reactor needs a cold sink which limits the electric power to very little. A chemical source, for instance an airplane engine, can dump the heat with the exhaust gas.

Nuclear weapons have no relationship with missiles. The two last ones travelled by plane, present ones are mostly on cruise missiles (airplanes), the next ones may well travel in a cargo ship followed by an elevator. A serious defence would hence target the bombs, not missiles.

Electron orbitals cannot produce gamma rays because this is the definition of X-rays. Gammas require nucleus transitions.

As far as I ignore (a lot) X-ray lasers using deep electron transitions don't work, essentially because the surrounding matter is too opaque. Or you get rid of the matrix, have only lasing atoms which are then necessarily vaporized at each shot (even more so than for optical lasers) and have the proper source of power to invert the population. One old speculative description involved a tiny plutonium bomb surrounded by wires of heavy metal that lase in superradiant mode.

One laser using very soft nucleus transitions is to radiate in X energy. Seen the theoretical description 2 years (?) ago. This one would be reusable.

Some very limited gamma lasing effect has been observed using a beam of positrons impacting normal matter. I proposed elsewhere to sweep the beam impact at the speed of light so population inversion precedes shortly the light pulse. No idea if someone has tried.