If high energy particles are injected into a containment field in a containment chamber what field strength would be necessary and how can these high speed particles be contained?

Answer 1

Good luck with this project. Let's set it up. A focused (minimally divergent) beam of high energy particles is injected into a containment chamber (which is highly evacuated) with a magnetic containment field. Let's start there. First, the beam doesn't want to "stay together" and will try to spread out like shot after it leaves a shotgun barrel. Each attempt to focus it will suck energy from the beam, and the beam will again try to diverge after leaving the lens that was used to focus it. Lots of luck with that. Yes, a magnetic field will be needed to contain the particles, but some kind of doughnut-shaped chamber will be necessary so the particles can "run around" it and stay contained. High energy particles won't be standing still. And all the while they will be trying to diverge and the containment field will be trying to keep them in a group, or at least a short string. This activity will remove energy from the stream of particles. No way around it. You'll need some luck with that. The field strength required to contain the particles will be a function of the energy of the particles. What did you have in mind for particle energies? And how efficient is your containment chamber? Storing charged particles, particularly high energy ones, is something that is extremely difficult to do. Arguably the best storage device is the accelerator that was used to create them. We can inject a stream of particles, speed them up, and put them in a "holding pattern" in the accelerator. There's your storage chamber. But it takes a lot of energy to do this. Building a "little containment chamber" to hold the output of a big accelerator is not something that can be done with current technology. We just can't overcome the physical obstacles. The barriers to the development of the idea of containment of a high energy particle bunch or stream are too great to allow us to overcome them with what we currently know and can do. And that means putting a value on magnetic field strength in a "containment chamber" isn't something we can do. Said another way, if it takes a big accelerator to produce the high energy particles, you can't containg them in a little box. Or you could have used the little box to accelerate them to bring them up to energy. The experimental fusion reactor project has a big magnetic torus built into it to contain the plasma. And that project isn't exactly moving at the speed of light because the technical hurdles are too large. This question, while an excellent one, makes a proposal that places demands on technology that science and engineering cannot currently deliver.