About 12 years ago or so I thought I'd write an article for the proverbial average interested layman that would explore the ways, if any, that nanotechnology could be applied to nuclear fusion. Problem was, I actually didn't know the answer and there was almost nothing formally done other than hand-waving speculation. Besides, there are enormous differences in energy scales between chemical bindings and useful nuclear fusion collision energies (on the rough order of 1000 to 100,000.) So first thing I felt I had to do was write some simulation code to model the nuclei traveling at high energies within some well-known mechanism - such as a proton traveling through an electrostatic focusing lens.
That was a mistake - at least if I had planned to complete the article in any reasonable time frame. I got a little ways with things, having taken the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (which from a computer programming perspective is really two related equations - one for the real part, one for the imaginary part) and developed a simple program in C and some Python glue code that used the staggered leap-frog algorithm (CTCS) to simulate its time evolution. I found a nice utility to help me generate mpeg movies from a sequence of RBG image files and I managed to put the following initial page together:
http://www.lugoj.com/NanotechFusion/nanotechfusion.html
I never got further - realized I was about to embark on an original research project that would take a long time. And the machine I had was no speed demon.
What annoys me the most, though, is after diligent searching I can't find my old C and Python code anymore. I was sure I had an archive copy of it from the old computer I developed it on, but I've had no luck finding it on the clutch of computers I now have in my office. Of course I could rewrite it, and probably do a better job the second time around, but it annoys me to lose what I considered unfinished work.
That was a mistake - at least if I had planned to complete the article in any reasonable time frame. I got a little ways with things, having taken the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (which from a computer programming perspective is really two related equations - one for the real part, one for the imaginary part) and developed a simple program in C and some Python glue code that used the staggered leap-frog algorithm (CTCS) to simulate its time evolution. I found a nice utility to help me generate mpeg movies from a sequence of RBG image files and I managed to put the following initial page together:
http://www.lugoj.com/NanotechFusion/nanotechfusion.html
I never got further - realized I was about to embark on an original research project that would take a long time. And the machine I had was no speed demon.
What annoys me the most, though, is after diligent searching I can't find my old C and Python code anymore. I was sure I had an archive copy of it from the old computer I developed it on, but I've had no luck finding it on the clutch of computers I now have in my office. Of course I could rewrite it, and probably do a better job the second time around, but it annoys me to lose what I considered unfinished work.