Answering a question – Is it possible to accelerate neutrons?
Can ever neutrons be directly accelerated by any means of energy ?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can-Ever-neutrons-be-directly-accelerated-by-any-means-of-energy
Riccardo Bernardini This is an interesting article. But search “neutron accelerator” on Google and you get many tens of thousands of entry points. The neutron has a magnetic moment, so is affected by any magnetic gradient. Actually by any energy density gradient of the right size and timing. But it is a well developed and valuable technique.
I have been following neutron control methods for many years, but I am looking at low cost methods for research and development groups. And for low and middle income countries. Neutron sources can be tuned, neutrons can be slowed, neutrons can be focused, neutron activation and scattering have many uses. Lots of useful things now. The same methods (and better ones) work on any particle of any size that has a permanent or induced magnetic or electric moment.
(“accelerating neutrons” OR “neutron accelerator”) has 102,000 entry points (Google, 11 Mar 2022).
If you search for “The development of a low energy neutron accelerator for rebunching pulsed neutrons” there are a few places the PDF is posted.
If you see their equation (1) it has the usual B^2 term, that is a good indication energy density gradient methods are the low cost way to handle it. I have been at this for just over 40 years now. Lots of times the original ideas and methods never amount to much, even if a lot of money gets spent. It is when it gets into “engineering” stage that new products, devices and applications for society happen. With more sensitive amplifiers and ADCs, with high sampling rates and low latency monitoring of real time data streams, many things that were “impossible” a year ago, are possible now.
Every day I read the “old” books and papers from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s and 10’s to see places they said “impossible”, and what they should have said, “not economic or possible with our current sensors, computers and algorithms”. And that has changed, dramatically, in the last year or so.
I try to track those things every day for the Internet Foundation. Because the methods of the Internet depend on those same technologies applied to problems in all parts of human society.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
