The emergence of electronics marked a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship to information. Underlying this shift was a revolution in the way we understood and interacted with electrons: rather than continuing to blow large aggregates of electrons through vacuum tubes, the transistor represented deliberate, precise control of electronic states.
What if, similar to our control of electronic states, we gained precise control of nuclear states?
We will show here why and how this is possible, drawing on known quantum principles and many-body effects. By doing so, we seek to lay the groundwork for the emerging domain of nucleonics. Nucleonics will trigger a fundamental shift in our relationship to energy, not unlike electronics triggered a fundamental shift in our relationship to information.
A shift in perspective
Generations of physicists have treated nuclear fusion as a two-body collision problem and nuclear reactions more generally as two-body processes. However, the simplicity of this picture has been depriving us of important insights.
In a more comprehensive picture, nuclear fusion can be viewed as the transition from one occupation probability configuration to another, where such configurations are described by wave functions that encompass all nucleons in the system. This many-body picture is the same way researchers routinely think about state transitions in other quantum systems such as at the atomic and molecular level.
This shift in perspective opens up the nuclear fusion process to known tools of quantum engineering that can be used to modify and accelerate such transitions. We accelerate fusion reactions of light nuclei by coupling them to heavy nuclei that can resonantly absorb the energy released in the fusion transition. This both accelerates the reaction rate and alters the reaction products.
Implication 1: complete decoupling of nuclear energy from radiation
The canonical products of most fusion and fission reactions contain radioactive isotopes or hazardous neutrons. By coherently coupling matching nuclear reactions, their reaction products can be changed and their reaction rates accelerated. The preferred combination of nuclear reactions we presently work with are deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions that drive the excitation of metal nuclei, resulting in their clean disintegration via charged particle emission.
Coupling and modifying nuclear reactions requires no extensive capital equipment or large facilities. What is key are strong computational capabilities that allow for proper “mixing and matching” of state transitions that are resonant with each other. To this end, we are developing computational tools.
The coupling between nuclei can be instigated by shared electromagnetic fields such as ones generated in metal lattices by low-cost laser systems. Another set of our computational tools predicts the reaction products and reaction rates that result from different kinds of sample stimulation.
Implication 2: small-scale low-cost nuclear fusion systems
Technology developed on the basis of nucleonics principles can result in extremely small-scale (pocket-size) devices that convert hydrogen (deuterium) into helium while releasing large amounts of energy (>1 kWh/day) over long periods of time (over months and years).
