Meson Accelerator and its more plausible alternatives

Meson Accelerator and its more plausible alternatives

Part 1 Meson Accelerator

Part 1b Meson Accelerator Issues

Part 2 Update of the Meson Accelerator Concept. Enter, the Muon Cannon.

Part 3 The Neutron Beam Weapon

Part 4 Proton Beam

Part 5 Electron Beam

Conclusion Overview

Addendum: Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam

Part 1 Meson Accelerator

Perhaps one the most potent starship weapons is the dreaded Meson Accelerator (MA).

Warships have substantial armor to protect them from hostile missile, laser, and particle beam weapon fire.

Armor is utterly worthless against Meson Accelerator fire.

Meson Accelerators are marvelous as a planetary defense weapon. Meson Accelerators several kilometers below the planetary surface can still shoot at hostile orbiting spacecraft. Hostile spacecraft will not be able to shoot through several kilometers of solid rock, unless they too are armed with Meson Accelerators and know where your Meson Accelerator is located.

Meson Accelerators are so deadly because their method of action is so sneaky.

Particle accelerators, colliders create subatomic particles and make them move really fast in beam form. Particle Beam weapons are basically weaponized versions of these. Some kinds of particles are unstable, they have a short life-span. After a few nanoseconds they decay into other particles, radiation, or both.

Relativity says that at speeds close to that of light, time will slow down. At about 90% the speed of light (0.9 c), the slowdown is about 2 (called the "gamma factor"). If a particle has a life-span of 10 nanoseconds when sitting still (relative to you), when the particle is travelling at 0.9 c (relative to you) you will time it as having a life span of 20 nanoseconds or twice what it should be. At 0.95 c the life span will be 30 nanoseconds, at 0.98 c it will be 50 nanoseconds, and so on. I will spare you the math.

Our hypothetical particle moving at 0.9 c has a rate of 269,813,212 meters per second and has a time (life-span) of 20 nanoseconds or 0.00000002 seconds. Multiplying will show you that the particle will move a distance of about 5.396 meters before it decays. At 0.95 c, it will move 8.544 meters. At 0.98 c it will move 14.690 meters. At the maximum Gamma Factor of the baseline Large Hadron Collider, it would top out at about 23.5 kilometers. 23.5 kilometers sounds impressive, but geosynchronous orbit is often about 1000 times that distance.

To build a particle accelerator large enough to attack ships in orbit, a large planetside (I recommend underground) facility is required.

The point is by altering the speed of the particle you alter the point in space where it decays.

The "meson" in "meson accelerator" is because people figured that the particle called the neutral pi-meson (pions) would work. Mesons decay into a splendidly nasty spray of gamma rays, electrons and antimatter electrons (positrons).

With the meson accelerator, we have a particle that easily passes through most matter in general (and starship armor in particular) but will eventually decay into a spray of deadly radiation. Aim the particle accelerator at the enemy starship, calculate the range between the accelerator and the enemy, then adjust the speed of the particles such that the point where they decay into deadly radiation is inside the center of the enemy starship. It is like teleporting a burst of radiation into the enemy ship's interior. It also will prematurely detonate any fission weapon and all fusion weapons that use a fission trigger. Almost all known fusion weapons use a fission trigger.

The Meson Accelerator would have made an ideal offensive weapon for the Desertborn as we have large deep subterranean particle accelerators with isolated power systems. Araxes is ideal, as it had a long and proud tradition of deep excavation and construction. Araxes Australis had 45 Planum and Craters between 25 and 250 times larger than the Large Hadron Collider, and could create using magnets near the physical limits of matter, Gamma Factors on the order of 200 million Gamma. 200 million Gamma is a lot, compared to 7840 Gamma Factor of the 27 kilometer circumference Large Hadron Collider at CERN. To actually hit a target in geosynchronous orbit, you would need a Gamma Factor of nearly 1000 times that requiring a combination of 100 times larger and magnets 10 times more powerful.

Building a particle accelerator collider the size of the near continent-sized Hellas Crater, 2300 kilometers diameter, using powerful superconducting electromagnets at near the physical limits of matter (730 Teslas), we can manage a Gamma Factor of about 150 million, which would make the half-life target be about 1.5 light-seconds (450,000 kilometres) away, nearly all the way to the Mu Draconis – Araxes L1 and L2 Lagrangian Libration Points.

Part 1b Meson Accelerator Issues

Closer examination of the physicality and plausibility of the Meson Accelerator exposed some issues.

Sadly, after a lot of effort and embarrassing myself asking people who are better at physics than I am, I have failed to be able to make the Meson Accelerator to be credible.

Problem Number One: The premise if flawed. Pions are stopped by armor, because they are affected by the strong nuclear force. Pions interact via the nuclear forces. A beam of pions traveling through a material will have a chance of hitting an atomic nucleus. A nucleus has an effective cross sectional "size" of about 10^-30 m^2 for high energy particles. A cubic meter of solid or liquid matter with atoms spaced about 0.1 nm apart (a typical atomic spacing) will contain 10^30 nuclei. The total combined cross sectional "area" for the beam to interact with is thus about 10^-30 m^2/nucleus * 10^30 nuclei = 1m^2 — the same cross sectional area as our cubic meter of matter. Thus, a beam of particles interacting only via nuclear forces can expect to hit a nucleus after going through about 1 meter of solid or liquid matter (or about 1000 meters of gas at atmospheric density, since gas is about 1000 times less dense). Note that this distance is not affected by relativistic time dilation — there are just as many nuclei in your path no matter how fast you go. When a pion hits a nucleus at these energies, the nucleus will either have a chip knocked off — a proton, neutron, alpha particle, deuteron, or triton — or shatter into fragments. These nuclear pieces will have considerable energy of their own, hit other nuclei, cause more fragmentation, and so on, while those pieces that are charged will also lose energy to ionization. The pion may or may not be captured when it interacts. If it is not captured, it keeps going (although with less energy) and can knock into more nuclei.

Problem Number Two: Pions DO NOT have a life span of EXACTLY 0.000000084 nanoseconds, they have a HALF-LIFE of 0.000000084 nanoseconds. This means along the entire beam pions are decaying, by the time you reach 0.000000084 nanoseconds half of the pions in the beam have decayed. So there is not a pin-point dot where the pions decay, it is a gradual decay along the whole beam. Also, it means that more of the particles decay at the point of creation, not at the target. These nuclear interactions are not tuneable to some precise distance — they occur throughout the path of the beam as pions and fragments encounter nuclei. Also, the time to decay is random. A pion might live on average 8.6×10^-17 seconds in its own rest frame, but this means that half of your pions will have decayed before 8.6×10-17 seconds is up, and half are still around. After 17.2×10^-17 seconds, you still have one quarter of your original number of pions still waiting around to decay, and one-eighth of the pions after 25.8×10^-17 seconds. If you turn these into a beam of relativistic particles to delay their decay time, you still get them decaying at random all along their beam path, not at one specific point.

Thus the original and stated concept of the Meson Accelerator weapon is fatally flawed.

Part 2 Update of the Meson Accelerator Concept. Enter, the Muon Cannon.

Nowadays, a meson means a particle composed of a quark and an anti-quark, but back when the Meson Accelerator was proposed a meson was a particle with a mass significantly more than an electron but significantly less than a proton or neutron.

One such old school particles formerly classified as a "meson" was the "mu-meson," which we now categorize as a sort of heavy electron and not a meson at all. Muons, as they are now called, do not interact via the strong nuclear force, but they are charged. Charged particles lose energy at a well defined rate as they go through matter (depending on the particle's charge and speed, the density of the matter, and some details on the chemical and electronic properties of the matter like how hard it is to knock electrons off; you know …. science).

Since all the particles in the beam are losing energy at the same rate, they all have nearly the same energy at any point along the beam as they go through matter. This means they all come to a stop at more or less the same point. If it is a muon, it will decay after it stops into a highly energetic electron plus a couple of neutrinos. The highly energetic electron will dump all its energy into the surrounding material very rapidly. Meanwhile, muons themselves are extremely penetrating — muons from cosmic rays have penetrated not only the entire atmosphere but over a kilometer of rock. By tuning the energy of a beam of muons, and with a good estimate of how thick your target is and a rough idea of its density and composition, you can choose an energy so that all the muons come to a stop in the middle of the target due to ionization losses and then dump a lot of energy there with their decays. You can only do this because muons do not interact via the strong nuclear force, so they do not hit nuclei like mesons or neutrons or protons would — this makes muons far more penetrating.

A bit better than the pi neutral meson, muons have a lifetime of about 2 microseconds. If you are tuning the energy to choose how deeply into the target the muons decay, you can't boost the muons up to ultra-relativistic energies to give them enough time dilation to reach distant targets. That would give them so much energy that they would seriously overpenetrate.

With a maximum time dilation of maybe 10 for practical purposes, this gives a muon gun a maximum range of around 6 km — less for thinner targets that need lower energy muons if you want the beam to stop in the middle. You will have lost half your muons at 6 km with a time dilation of 10 — the beam still goes on a bit further with diminished intensity, but after a few multiples of 6 km, the beam will have been attenuated so much that it will not do anything significant.

Muon beams are able to punch through tens of kilometers of air, producing a very long range radiation weapon for use in an atmosphere, but not so much that they are usable for orbital bombardment. Muons are short lived particles, and will decay within several tens of kilometers in any environment.

This actually makes them somewhat workable for ship mounted weapons, as they only need a Gamma Factor of 10 to be workable. Targeting will require substantial sensor data and computer simulation to be effective. As I mentioned before, knowledge of the density and thicknesses of the target matter, and some details on the chemical and electronic properties of the matter like how hard it is to knock electrons off; you know …. science. It’s why they have science officers! RESPECT! It is not something one could use effectively without competent science and engineering teams.

The Muon Cannon is only useful at 10s of kilometres, not thousands or millions of kilometres for space combat.

Part 3 The Neutron Beam Weapon

A neutron beam weapon would pass through several tens of centimeters of solid matter with little interaction, but would rapidly interact with any material containing hydrogen (including water, wax, oil, and biological tissue), heating the hydrogenated material in the beam path. A neutron beam would also cause residual radioactivity where it struck heavy elements. It is a way to directly attack the biological targets within a light to medium armoured ship, without having to beat the armour itself. It would have the range of your standard particle beam weapon in space. It would have the same problems as a proton or other particle beam in an atmosphere and as such is not effective for orbital bombardment.

Part 4 Proton Beam

Proton beams are used for combat in vacuum. Individual protons are accelerated to ultra-relativistic velocities. As the beam exits the accelerator, it is neutralized by injecting an electron beam to cancel the charges. This prevents self repulsion from defocusing the beam and keeps the beam from veering in ambient magnetic fields.

The primary limit to the range of a proton beam is the thermal velocity of the protons. Neutralization of the beam unavoidably heats the beam due to the energy of recombination with the electrons. After exiting the accelerator, they begin to drift apart at roughly 15 km/s. The higher the proton energy, the farther the travel in the time it takes the beam to disperse.

Proton beam accelerators are typically circular tracks several hundred meters to several tens of kilometers in diameter. Even the largest proton accelerators do not give their protons enough energy to rival x-ray lasers in range, and thus x-ray lasers dominate for deep space combat. Proton beams are typically employed in craft designed for combat in planetary orbit, and find use in blockades and operations to achieve orbital superiority prior to a ground assault.

Like electron beams, proton beams can be steered with magnets prior to neutralization. In addition, the beam can be emitted from several ports along the ring diameter, allowing rapid retargeting.

The relativistic protons in these beams can be extremely penetrating, typically punching through a meter or so of solid or liquid matter before disintegrating into a shower of radiation, which itself can penetrate many more meters of solid or liquid matter. These "cascade" radiation showers produce an extremely high radiation environment which will sterilize the area of all biological life and destroy unhardened electronics. The only defense against a proton beam is thick layers of inert shielding, or using only radiation hardened control systems. Proton rich shielding is most effective on a per-mass basis.

In an atmosphere, proton beams lose energy through ionization and direct collisions with the nuclei of air atoms, limiting their range to a few hundred meters in earth-like atmospheres. While this is comparable to the range of electron beams in air, an electron beam accelerator is much more compact.

Part 5 Electron Beam

Electron beams are used in atmosphere where radiation weapons are needed in an atmosphere. Highly relativistic electrons can penetrate relatively far through air, and by heating the air they pass through to a partial vacuum the leading edge of the beam can increase the range of the electrons that follow. The high currents cause the beam to self-pinch, reducing beam spread due to scattering off air molecules. Nevertheless, the beam constantly loses energy as it ionizes air molecules in the beam. This limits the range to a few hundred meters or a couple kilometers at best in atmospheres. At high altitudes or in thinner atmospheres, an electron beam's range is greatly extended.

An electron beam in air looks like a geometrically straight bolt of blue-white lightning, surrounded by a blue nimbus of Cerenkov radiation due to the electrons scattered from the primary beam.

Scattered electrons and bremsstrahlung x-rays create a high radiation environment both near the beam path and in the vicinity of the point of incidence of the beam.

Electron beam weapons have a minimum length of over a meter. These minimal electron accelerators have a range of around 200 meters in air at the density of terrestrial standard sea level. Longer accelerators can produce higher energy electrons that can penetrate further through air. The upper limit is around one to two kilometers, for accelerators in excess of ten meters in length. Electron accelerators are typically long, linear structures.

Electron beams are easily steered with magnets. This enables the beam to be rapidly redirected without turning the entire accelerator.

In the vacuum of space, the highly charged electrons repel each other and the beam quickly loses focus. In addition, the electrons are deflected by planetary magnetic fields and the magnetic fields in the solar wind, causing their paths to veer erratically.

Conclusion Overview

1. The Meson Accelerator is not plausible.

2. The closest replacement of the Meson Accelerator is the Muon Cannon, which has much shorter range, but can be ship mounted. Is sadly not workable for the envisioned deep subterranean defensive battery.

3. The Neutron Beam Weapon is a plausible but limitations of use, but longer range particle beam weapon similar in effect to the Meson Accelerator, and can be ship mounted.

4. The Proton Beam Weapon is quite penetrable, but has spreading issues even in vacuum. It is however versatile for aiming and can be ship mounted. Proton Beams are deflectable with energy based shielding

5. The Electron Beam Weapon is not especially penetrable, the spread less than Proton Beams, but less than Neutron beams, they are deflectable with energy based shielding.

Note: Meson Accelerators (if they were plausible), Muon Cannons and Neutron Beam Weapons are not like your standard weapons where you can just have a gunner point and shoot, they require science and engineering specialists to be able to operate them with experienced intuition and judgement, such tasks cannot just be assigned to a computer. This probably explains the greater popularity of the Proton and Electron Beam weapons, despite their limitations.

Addendum: Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam

Research into the Meson Accelerator and the Muon Cannon uncovered a more viable alternative, the Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam.

The idea originally was developed for the purpose of remote inducing of fragmentary fission in nuclear weapons, the idea that the fractional fizzling fission would have only about 3% of the detonating power of one that was properly triggered, and also below the threshold to use the fission implosion for inducing fusion.

For example, a typical 100 megaton fusion device contains about 20 kilograms of Deuterium and 30 kilograms of Tritium, but also 4 kilograms of Uranium-235 as the fusion triggering device. There is also about 8 tons of Uranium-238 (Depleted Uranium or Duranium) used as a tamper and neutron reflector to keep the critical mass together long enough to fission the U-235. If the 4-kilograms of U-235 prematurely and fractionally fissions, then it would produce about 3% of its optimum yield, about 1 kiloton TNT equivalent instead of 35 kilotons and will not be enough to trigger the fusion reaction. Thus a 100 megaton device becomes a 1 kiloton device; a 100,000 to 1 reduction in destructive power. Given that the entire assembly of such a weapon is approximately 27 tons, it is barely 40 to 1 yield. 1 kiloton is not insubstantial, it will melt about 400 cubic meters of iron, and leave a 175 meter crater if above ground in solid rock.

Although it is possible that the beam would completely melt the fission trigger and cause it to not detonate at all, the chances are minimal, a minimum yield of 3% can be depended upon.

The important detail to remember is that most fusion weapons contain fissionable materials. As fissionable materials are in finite supply is why most starships depend upon beam weapons as their primary offensive weapon. Even Antimatter Catalyzed Microfusion Energy (ACME) weapons require 1 part fissionable materials for every 9 parts of fusionable fuel.

Beyond their use in 'disarming' nuclear weapons, the Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam Weapon has other applications. Their primary advantage is that (depending on the energy level) penetrate thousands of kilometres of solid material with minimal interaction.

At an energy of 1000 TeV, the free mean path of a Neutrino Beam would allow it to penetrate up to 13000 kilometers of solid material of any kind, creating a hadron shower of radiation. The average radiation would be a dose of 1-Sievert per second over a volume of about 1 cubic meter. An acute dose of 1-Sievert is enough to incapacitate a given living organic being with radiation sickness, 100-Sieverts is a fatal dose. 1-Sievert per second over a volume of about 1 cubic meter is also the amount that would make inoperable any unhardened electronic equipment. Most important for the original design is that it is the amount required to induce fractional fission of fissionable materials.

1000 TeV is a heavy output. Standard Measure Class-5 Large Hadron Collider, 27 kilometer circumference with 8-Tesla magnets can produce 6.75 TeV. Upgrading to 45-Tesla Magnets (commercially available circa 2520s), would require a particle accelerator of about 700-kilometer circumference. Even with magnets at the limits of physical matter (730-Teslas), a 44-kilometer circumference particle accelerator would be required. This is not a shipboard weapon.

Checking the Federationalist Zone Starship Recognition Guide, the maximum output of starship based particle accelerators appears to be within the range of 2.5-6.4 TeV, which will penetrate 32-82 kilometers of solid material. Even with substantial redesign, the range is unlikely to more than double that due to structural limits.

The energy costs are about 50 Gigawatts, which is the fusion of about half a kilogram of Deuterium-Tritium per second.

If one constructs a racetrack shaped muon storage ring, most of the muons decay in the two opposite directions of the straight sections, creating two neutrino 'hotspots' where all of the decays will line up into a narrow 'pencil' beam. Note the curved sections also emits hazardous neutrinos in the local vicinity.

The design requirements necessary to steer or otherwise direct the neutrino beam is a normal engineering consideration.

The mean-free path of the (anti-) neutrinos versus its energy requirement is calculated assuming that the deep inelastic cross section dominates in the relevant energy region. The neutrino beam must have an energy of about 1000 TeV to have approximately single interaction before the beam hits the target distance 12750 kilometers away.

The beam spread due to the transverse momentum of the beam is negligible at this energy is the current value of the ionization cooling is Pt = 1 MeV is adopted. The effective neutrino interaction is restricted to within a few meters because of the interaction range of the hadron shower.

The net energy deposit from the 1000 TeV neutrino beam will be 1000 Joules/sec * M^2, which is the equivalent doze of 1-Sievert, which as an acute dose is enough to incapacitate due to radiation sickness and 1 minute of such is fatal. For the purposes of destruction of nuclear materials, it will take 100 seconds at this intensity to fission it all and 1000 to melt it. Instead of an instant fission explosion, it is a 100 second long fizzing reaction. If the circumstance is such that the fissionable material is stored separately from the weapon warhead, it will merely melt down or vaporize, but will take 10 times longer.

While originally designed for remote fission disposal, the Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam has uses as an offensive weapon. Like the Meson Accelerator, the Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam is virtually transparent to armour (even 12000 kilometers of iron-nickel planetary core and mantle), and produces a debilitating shower of radiation against all organic targets within several meters.

The Araxes Desertborn have large deep subterranean particle accelerators with isolated power systems. Araxes is ideal, as it had a long and proud tradition of deep excavation and construction. Araxes Australis has 45 Planum and Craters between 25 and 250 times larger than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and could create using magnets near the physical limits of matter, Gamma Factors on the order of 20 to 200 million Gamma. 150-200 million Gamma is a lot, compared to 7840 Gamma Factor of the 27 kilometer circumference Large Hadron Collider at CERN. To actually hit a target in geosynchronous orbit, you would need a Gamma Factor of nearly 1000 times that requiring a combination of 100 times larger and magnets 10 times more powerful.

Commercially available magnets of 45-Teslas would require a particle accelerator of 710-kilometers circumference, which Araxes Australis has over 45 sites available for. To hit targets directly overhead in Geosynchronous Orbit would require 70-Teslas, which usually has to be special ordered. To hit targets thru the planet and in Geosynchronous Orbit would require 115-Teslas, which has to be special ordered.

To hit targets thru the planet and in Geosynchronous Orbit would using 570-Teslas magnets, accelerator circumference can be as low as 144-kilometers. Magnets greater than 120-Teslas are usually regulated. The United Federation of Planets only has large scale magnets greater than 200-Teslas in 5 of their starship classes since the 2370s. Imperium Military sources can provide up to 570-Telsa’s. Obscure sources such as the Spatium Tempus Navigatium Corpus have magnets up to 730-Tesla’s which is the physical limit of non-exotic matter.

Nano-composite rare-earth metal magnetic material are laminated between 15 and 20 atoms thick creating a narrow 1-3 atom thick corridor with substantially higher magnetic flux, the net result is permanent (non-electromagnet) magnets made from nano-composite rare-earth metal with net internal magnetic field flux of 900-Tesla and superconducting nano-composite rare-earth metal magnets with net internal magnetic field flux of 14,600-Tesla. While technically possible, a complete re-engineering on the level of fundamental principles would be required to use this for this application. Further complicated by the fact that the Elvian Dominion of Planets will not export these nano-composite rare-earth metal magnets. No one else has demonstrated the pre-requisite technological mastery of combining nano-composite rare-earth metal magnets with the extremely precise control of the crystal-engineering, on the requisite scale.

Observational analysis shows that the Elvian Dominion of Planets has macroscopic quantities of these which they employ in their starships, but it is not known if they produce quantities sufficient for the large scale application described herein, even if they were so inclined to export them.

Using exotic materials, such as massed monopoles, similar principles up to 32,000-Teslas is possible, but only the Spatium Tempus Navigatium Corpus are known to be able to manufacture them, and only do so for their own purposes. They don’t return my calls.

A 29-ton stargate will yield 2-kilograms of Naquadah which is a lattice which contains less than 250-grams massed monopoles. I am not even going to estimate how many stargates would be required to construct even one accelerator; even so, there are much better uses for massed monopoles.

The Elvian Dominion of Planets scavenges nano-scopic and micro-scopic amounts from Jovian giants using their plasma antenna technology, but is way below the quantities that would be required even if they could be cajoled into exporting them.

For most applications, the Desertborn use up to 120-Teslas, which is suitable for this application, but special orders from Imperium Military vendors up to 600-Teslas. I know a guy who can hook us up.

The Concentrated Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam is a more realistic and viable alternative to the Meson Accelerator and the Muon Cannon, and the requisite materials are readily available.