Particle Beam Weapon - Beam Generation

Beam Generation

Charged particle beams diverge rapidly due to mutual repulsion, so neutral particle beams are more commonly proposed. A neutral particle beam weapon ionizes hydrogen gas by either stripping an electron off of each hydrogen atom, or by allowing each hydrogen atom to capture an extra electron. When hydrogen molecules gain electrons, they form anions; when hydrogen molecules lose electrons, they form cations; when hydrogen atoms lose their last electron they form protons. A particle beam weapon that accelerates anions uses a traveling wave type particle accelerator. In this kind of ion accelerator, the negative ions are released inside a cylindrical ion acceleration chamber. This chamber has an electrode with an alternating electric charge of up to 1,000,000,000 volts inside it.

Stages:

1. While the charge on the electrode is positive, the ions are attracted to the negative charge on the electrode, and thus bunched around it.
2. The alternating voltage switches the charge to negative on the accelerating electrode.
3. The negative charge electrostatically repels the negative ions and accelerates them to near the velocity of light.
4. The resulting high energy beam of anions passes through a chamber filled with low pressure gas.
5. There, collisions with the gas strip the extra electrons from the anions, and thus make the particle beam neutral.
6. The particle beam proceeds straight to its target, and damages it by running into it, and by disrupting the structure of the target with its kinetic energy.

Cyclotron particle accelerators, linear particle accelerators, and synchroton particle acclerators can accelerate positively charged hydrogen ions until their velocity approaches the speed of light, and each individual ion has a kinetic energy range of 100 MeV to 1000 MeV or more. Then the resulting high energy protons can capture electrons from electron emitter electrodes, and be thus electrically neutralized. This creates an electrically neutral beam of high energy hydrogen atoms, that can proceed in a straight line at near the speed of light to smash into its target and damage it.

The pulsed particle beam emitted by such a weapon may contain 1 gigajoule of kinetic energy or more. The speed of a beam approaching that of light (300,000 km/s) in combination with the energy created by the weapon would negate any realistic means of defending a target against the beam. Target hardening through shielding or materials selection would be impractical or ineffective, especially if the beam could be maintained at full power and precisely focused on the target.