Does quickly shorting out an inductor in series with a capcitor create a small emp?

What are you shorting out? What are the initial conditions of the inductor and capacitor?

 

You still haven't specified the initial conditions. Do you mean that you have an inductor connected in series with a capacitor, and the capacitor has an initial voltage Vo on it, and the initial inductor current Io is zero? And then you complete the circuit with a switch to "short them out"?

 

Or else maybe he means that he has the LC circuit you describe, but then he really does short out the inductor when it has maximum current going through it. This is a pretty benign short, since the voltage across the inductor is zero when the current is not changing (at the top of its sine wave current waveform). With that shorting wire in place across the inductor (and across the capacitor too, since the L and C are connected together), the current in the inductor will keep circulating through the inductor and wire, and will ramp down slowly with the L-R time constant, where the R is the resistance of the inductor windings and the shorting wire.

Open circuiting a current-carrying inductor is definitely more interesting than shorting it out. :rofl: