A Miniature Controllable Sun

Memo WFC 426 ends by pointing at memo WFC 429. This is that memo, and it is the strangest thing in the technical brief.

It opens with a page of questions about seeds, unborn children, hurricanes and the expansion of the universe. It ends by naming a device: the Optical Thermal Lens, which Meyer calls an EASER, by analogy with the laser.

The drawing

Figure 10-2, in Optical Thermal Lens, shows a high-temperature quartz tube of hydrogen-enriched gas, two voltage zones running its length, a reflective end plate at one end, a partially transparent end plate at the other, a focusing lens and a target diffuser — driven by the Amp Inhibiting Network, figure 8XA.

That is the architecture of a gas laser: a gain medium between two mirrors, one partially transmitting, pumped by a transverse discharge.

And that particular laser exists. R. T. Hodgson, Physical Review Letters 25, 494 (1970): laser action in the Lyman bands of molecular hydrogen near 160 nm, pumped by a Blumlein parallel-plate line discharging through hydrogen at 20 to 150 Torr. Two-nanosecond pulses. Meyer drew the same machine about twenty years later, with no access to the paper — and the drives are opposite. Hodgson's line dumps kiloamps in two nanoseconds; Meyer's chokes exist to do the reverse.

What the tube would actually do

Meyer's mechanism is that applied voltage stretches the hydrogen atom until an "energy aperture" in the nucleus admits Universal Energy. From A Technique Called "Easer":

The stimulated spontaneously emission of electromagnetic radiation from the hydrogen atom (or other atoms) by way of "Electrical Stress" is, hereinafter, called "Easer."

Deforming an atom with an applied field is real and is called the Stark effect. At 40 kV across his own gap the ground-state hydrogen atom shifts by about one part in 2.4 million of its binding energy, and the field needed to pull the electron off a cold atom is 204 times larger — about eight megavolts across that gap rather than forty kilovolts.

But the threshold falls as 1/n⁴, and the atoms in a lit tube are not cold:

level	over-barrier field
n = 1	3.2 × 10¹⁰ V/m
n = 2	2.0 × 10⁹
n = 3	4.0 × 10⁸
n = 4	1.25 × 10⁸
n = 5	5.1 × 10⁷
what Meyer applies	~1.5 × 10⁸

His field lands between n = 3 and n = 4. It cannot strip a cold atom; it can strip one that is already most of the way out — which is testable, because field ionisation eats the high Balmer lines first.

And he asked for heat, not a beam

The device is called the Optical Thermal Lens, and A Technique Called "Easer" says what the output is for:

Focusing lens (921) is simply used to redirect the Radiant-Energy (917) to a heat diffuser (923) capable of converting Radiant-Energy (917) to heat energy for industrial usage.

So the standard objection — that 160 nm cannot cross his quartz, his air or his lens — is true of the coherent beam and beside the point for a heater. Light absorbed in the quartz wall is heat, slightly nearer the source than he drew it. And a hydrogen discharge also emits the broad molecular continuum from ~160 to 400 nm, which ordinary quartz passes: the tube is a UV lamp as well as a visible one.

The one sentence he is usually convicted on

"Stimulated spontaneously emission" is read as proof he could not tell spontaneous from stimulated. On tape at Deer Creek in 1985:

The correlation between this is like that of a laser. If I have a laser here with two silver mirrors and I would start to excite the laser, you bounce back and forth the photon energy before you release it out.

And memo 429's own first page lists, as prior art he is departing from, "photon energy absorption to activate a laser device by the use of a strobe light" — optical pumping, stated correctly. Read the phrase as the sentence around it reads: spontaneous emission, stimulated by electrical stress.

The ballast

But the tube lights up anyway. Forty kilovolts along a tube of low-pressure hydrogen is tens to hundreds of times over the Paschen breakdown voltage. What comes out is the Balmer series — 656, 486, 434 and 410 nm — the ordinary light of a hydrogen discharge lamp, produced by electrons falling through twelve volts and colliding. Which is current.

And current through a glow discharge must be ballasted: a discharge has negative differential resistance and will run from glow to arc unless it is fed through a series impedance. A neon sign's ballast is a choke. Meyer drew the ballast first and the tube second. Gabel's measured 1.26 H choke presents ~40 kΩ at 5 kHz; at 20 kV that ballasts the discharge at about 0.5 A peak. Not milliamps, not kiloamps — a ballasted lamp, which is what the drawing describes.

Copper or stainless? He says both

The copper-versus-stainless argument runs through three episodes, and Voltage to Amp Differential Ratio settles it. Figure 10-4 draws a dual-layered multi-spool with both:

Stainless Steel bifilar Coil-Stage Assembly … is electrically placed between Magnet Coil-Stage Assembly … and Water Gap (Cp) to obtain optimum Voltage to Amp Differential Ratio

Generally, magnet coil-wire length is longer than the Stainless steel coil-wire length and magnet bifilar-coil is placed on top of Stainless Steel bifilar-coil to maximize mutual inductance coil-field … while the resistive value (Rs2) of SS Coil-Wire performs the work of further resisting the flow of amps not inhibited by both self-Inductance fields

Magnet wire is copper. So: copper stages for the inductance, stainless stages for the resistance, in series, stainless nearest the gap, and the ratio between them is the tuning knob — which he names. The question was never copper or stainless. It was how many turns of each.

(The two memos do still disagree about the wire itself: Voltage to Amp Differential Ratio gives 430F as 0.0048 Ω/ft with no gauge; Capacitance (Cd) gives the same alloy as 60 µΩ·cm, which at .006 in is 10 Ω/ft. A factor of two thousand, and the one estate coil anybody has metered reads 77 Ω and is copper — see VIC coil readings.)

What to measure

Not a clamp meter. On a narrow high-voltage pulse it averages and reports something that is not the power. Q-V method: a measuring capacitor in series with the tube, scope in X-Y, the area of the loop is the energy per cycle. Then a thermopile at the diffuser, because heat is what he asked for. Compare against a commercial deuterium lamp: ~25 W in, a few watts of radiation out.

See Q factor and voltage rise and Breakdown voltage — Paschen's law.