Exotic particle weapons

[mr friendly guy]

In Trek we see aliens firing some particle of the week weapon. For example the Dominion used "phased polaron" beams which initially ripped through Federation shields. A DQ species (who "eludes memory") fired concentrated protons which penetrated Voyager's shields. In STO we get such exotic weapons as tetryons and antiprotons.

My question is, what real particles would actually make good beam weapons? Or what property must a hypothetical particle have to make it a good beam weapon. Presumably it must interact with baryonic matter in such a way to disrupt the intermolecular forces or even the forces within an atom. Using my limited knowledge on this matter,

1. some antimatter particles would be good, on the off chance it does react with normal matter to generate energy. *

* yes I remember Darth Wong's spiel about how most of the atom is empty space, which decreases the chance the anti matter particle will react with the positive matter one, at least in a short span of time to actually make it useful as a weapon. However wouldn't the opposing charges attract the particles? In fact, with PET scan there is always a reaction with the positron with an electron, so there must be a good chance for reaction.

2. Negative matter

From what I understand, this is allowed under Einstein's theory of general relativity but never been discovered. Supposedly this reacts with normal matter to cancel each other out, although its supposed to repel normal matter, so it might not even hit its target (although I assume its success would depend on the inertia of its target).

So what other exotic particles would make good beam weapons?

[biostem]

Assuming the other vessel has a biological crew, perhaps a highly concentrated beam of gamma rays could be used to kill the crew.

[Starglider]

However wouldn't the opposing charges attract the particles?

Yes, they would definitely react if you are firing them at non-relativistic speeds.

Assuming the other vessel has a biological crew, perhaps a highly concentrated beam of gamma rays could be used to kill the crew.

Neutrons are even more damaging, cause embrittlement and activation of hull structure, and are generally harder to shield against. Technologically it is more difficult to produce a neutron beam though.

[Batman]

Gamma rays are EM, not particles.
Ions. Not particularly exotic I agree, but anything that can be used for rocket propulsion can be used as a weapon.

And what in Valen's name is 'negative matter'?

For nonshielded targets antimatter should work just fine.

[Sea Skimmer]

Short of anti matter you would just want the heaviest possible particle, because its physically more likely to strike something in the target and when it does impact for a given beam velocity it'd inflict more damage. Same logic as conventional AP shells. Which is no surprise since this is still a KE based damage mechanism, just converted into heat via radiation effects on impact. Heavier faster impacts produce more intensive radiation shock damage, increasing effectiveness per unit of actual impact energy.

Neutrons are even more damaging, cause embrittlement and activation of hull structure, and are generally harder to shield against. Technologically it is more difficult to produce a neutron beam though.

As I recall you'll end up inducing free neutrons into the target anyway with a powerful enough particle beam, somewhat dependent on its composition.

[Darmalus]

And what in Valen's name is 'negative matter'?

From what I recall, it's matter with negative mass. One of those things where math and theoretical physics say it's completely possible, but good luck finding/making any.

[Simon_Jester]

The behavior of matter with negative mass would be so weird and counterintuitive that it is hard to say how well, or even IF, it could be used as a weapon.

More generally, it depends on what you mean by "exotic." Neutrons are not particularly "exotic." As I recall they make up something like one sixth of all visible mass in the universe, and they are disproportionately common in our own bodies. Electrons and protons are not "exotic," for similar reasons.

Antiparticles of the Big Three are "exotic" only in the sense that they are hard to create and store; their behavior is relatively plain vanilla. You could even make perfectly normal antiatoms out of antielectrons and antinucleons, and combine them into antimolecules, as long as nobody came along and poked them and blew it all to hell.

Gamma rays are likewise not "exotic" in that they are a routine part of existence in outer space where you will encounter plenty of high velocity electrons, gamma rays, and ions (atomic nuclei stripped of their electrons).

It's like calling the grass, rocks, or trees in your front yard "exotic."
________________

More "exotic" particles would be those which decay rapidly (e.g. muons or mesons) and those which do not interact readily with normal matter (e.g. neutrinos or, presumably, whatever the heck dark matter is made of).

The problem with those as weapons is that a weapon which spontaneously decays before it hits the target, or which completely ignores and fails to interact with the target, is not an effective weapon. There's a reason nobody fights wars by blowing soap bubbles at each other.
_____________________

That leaves entirely fictional particles like "tetryons" or "polarons" from Star Trek. So far as we know, those particles do not exist. If such particles DO exist (or exist in some universe with laws of nature different than ours)...

Well, how effective they could be as weapons depends on how their (unknown) properties interact with the (unknown) nature of the methods used to defend against them.

It turns out that polarons work really well as weapons in Star Trek, at least if you do something with the 'phase' of the particle relative to the shielding of your target. But that would then be a unique thing that matters only to the Star Trek universe, and would not be relevant as a general rule for other settings or for our own real universe.

[biostem]

Since we're talking about science fiction here - what if you fired immensely small grains of neutron-star material, encased in some sort of anti-gravity field, to counter their immense density - upon collision, said field dissipates, and the enemy ship has now gain a huge amount of mass that it probably didn't want. Not only would the ship become less maneuverable, but it could affect the gravitational stability of the crew area, thus making them less able to function.

[Darmalus]

More "exotic" particles would be those which decay rapidly (e.g. muons or mesons) and those which do not interact readily with normal matter (e.g. neutrinos or, presumably, whatever the heck dark matter is made of).

The problem with those as weapons is that a weapon which spontaneously decays before it hits the target, or which completely ignores and fails to interact with the target, is not an effective weapon. There's a reason nobody fights wars by blowing soap bubbles at each other.

I remember muon weapons from an RPG. They were described as aiming and timing the muons to explode inside the target when they decayed.

[Starglider]

Since we're talking about science fiction here - what if you fired immensely small grains of neutron-star material, encased in some sort of anti-gravity field, to counter their immense density - upon collision, said field dissipates, and the enemy ship has now gain a huge amount of mass that it probably didn't want. Not only would the ship become less maneuverable, but it could affect the gravitational stability of the crew area, thus making them less able to function.

Electron-degenerate and neutron-degenerate matter is only stable under extremely high gravity. Even if you had the technology to contain it, it would be dangerous to use in the same way as antimatter; if you lose containment it instantly explodes. Using it as a munition would be similar to a nuclear warhead in effects for small grains. Even for ridiculously massive projectiles, the explosive effects are always going to completely overwhelm the gravitic effects; the enemy ship will be totally obliterated long before they notice any extra gravity. Although if you have the crazy gravitic and/or inertial technology required to keep small bits of neutronium from exploding, that technology can almost certainly be used directly as a weapon as well; Schlock Mercenary illustrates this.

[FedRebel]

My question is, what real particles would actually make good beam weapons? Or what property must a hypothetical particle have to make it a good beam weapon.

Casaba Howitzer



From: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... onvent.php

The beryllium transforms the nuclear fury of x-rays into a nuclear fury of heat. Perched on top of the beryllium is the propellant: a thick plate of tungsten. The nuclear fury of heat turns the tungsten plate into a star-core-hot spindle-shaped-plume of ionized tungsten plasma. The x-ray opaque material and the beryllium oxide also vaporize a few microseconds later, but that's OK, their job is done.

The tungsten plasma jet hits square on the Orion drive pusher plate, said plate is designed to be large enough to catch all of the plasma. With the reference design of nuclear pulse unit, the plume is confined to a cone of about 22.5 degrees. About 85% of the nuclear device's energy is directed into the desired direction, which I think you'd agree is a vast improvement over 10%.

About this time the representatives of the military (who were funding this project) noticed that if you could make the plume a little faster and with a narrower cone, it would no longer be a propulsion system component. It would be a nuclear directed energy weapon. Thus was born project Casaba-Howitzer.

Details are scarce since the project is still classified after all these years. Tungsten has an atomic number (Z) of 74. When the tungsten plate is vaporized, the resulting plasma jet has a relatively low velocity and diverges at a wide angle (22.5 degrees). Now, if you replace the tungsten with a material with a low Z, the plasma jet will instead have a high velocity at a narrow angle ("high velocity" meaning "a recognizable fraction of the speed of light"). The jet angle also grows narrower as the thickness of the plate is reduced. This is undesirable for a propulsion system component (because it will destroy the pusher plate), but just perfect for a weapon (because it will destroy the enemy ship).

The 1960's USAF was awesome.

[Terralthra]

More "exotic" particles would be those which decay rapidly (e.g. muons or mesons) and those which do not interact readily with normal matter (e.g. neutrinos or, presumably, whatever the heck dark matter is made of).

The problem with those as weapons is that a weapon which spontaneously decays before it hits the target, or which completely ignores and fails to interact with the target, is not an effective weapon. There's a reason nobody fights wars by blowing soap bubbles at each other.

I remember muon weapons from an RPG. They were described as aiming and timing the muons to explode inside the target when they decayed.

This is a retrofit of meson beams. Atomic Rockets comments:

Muons, as they are now called, do not interact via the strong nuclear force but they are charged. Charged particles lose energy at a well defined rate as they go through matter (depending on the particle's charge and speed, the density of the matter, and some details on the chemical and electronic properties of the matter like how hard it is to knock electrons off). Since all the particles in the beam are losing energy at the same rate, they all have nearly the same energy at any point along the beam as they go through matter. In particular, this means they all come to a stop at more or less the same point. If it is a muon, it will decay after it stops into a highly energetic electron plus a couple of neutrinos. The highly energetic electron will dump all its energy into the surrounding material very rapidly. Meanwhile, muons themselves are extremely penetrating — muons from cosmic rays have been known to penetrate not only the entire atmosphere but over a kilometer of rock. By tuning the energy of a beam of muons, and with a good estimate of how thick your target is and a rough idea of its density and composition, you can choose an energy so that all the muons come to a stop in the middle of the target due to ionization losses and then dump a lot of energy there with their decays. You can only do this because muons do not interact via the strong nuclear force, so they do not hit nuclei like mesons or neutrons or protons would — this makes muons far more penetrating.

Alas, muons have a lifetime of about 2 microseconds. If you are tuning the energy to choose how deeply into the target the muons decay, you can't boost the muons up to ultra-relativistic energies to give them enough time dilation to reach distant targets (that would give them so much energy that they would seriously overpenetrate). With a maximum time dilation of maybe 10 for practical purposes, this gives a muon gun a maximum range of around 6 km — less for thinner targets that need lower energy muons if you want the beam to stop in the middle (more precisely, you will have lost half your muons at 6 km with a time dilation of 10 — the beam still goes on a bit further with diminished intensity, but after a few multiples of 6 km, the beam will have been attenuated so much that it will not do anything significant).

[Ted C]

Neutrons seem plausible. Collisions with neutrons will cause some unpleasant atomic reactions in the nuclei of atoms in the target. Since they're electrically neutral, they won't cause the ship shooting them to become charged, which would have some undesireable consequences, I think.

[Caiaphas]

Neutrons seem plausible. Collisions with neutrons will cause some unpleasant atomic reactions in the nuclei of atoms in the target. Since they're electrically neutral, they won't cause the ship shooting them to become charged, which would have some undesireable consequences, I think.

Has anyone come up with a theoretical means of accelerating the neutrons in the first place?

[biostem]

Neutrons seem plausible. Collisions with neutrons will cause some unpleasant atomic reactions in the nuclei of atoms in the target. Since they're electrically neutral, they won't cause the ship shooting them to become charged, which would have some undesireable consequences, I think.

Has anyone come up with a theoretical means of accelerating the neutrons in the first place?

What if you you accelerated hydrogen atoms, then stripped them of their proton and electron just before they left the "barrel" of the weapon, and headed toward their target?

[Simon_Jester]

For most hydrogen atoms that's all there is- take away the electron and you have a single isolated proton.

Moreover, "taking away" the proton from a deuterium nucleus (the kind that has a neutron) would involve hitting that nucleus very very hard. In which case you've probably scattered your 'beam' all over the place and your weapons isn't so much a neutron beam as a neutron aerosol spray.

[jwl]

Anything charged might end up being deflected by the same magnetic shields a ship may use to deflect solar wind.

[Elheru Aran]

Anything charged might end up being deflected by the same magnetic shields a ship may use to deflect solar wind.

Which is an IRL argument against particle weapons in space; they could very well be pointless since spaceships would be dealing with more powerful natural particle sources than anything humanity could create, admittedly a little more spread out than a concentrated beam but still. An electromagnetic shield against physical weapons, however, is quite another story.

[Simon_Jester]

Anything charged might end up being deflected by the same magnetic shields a ship may use to deflect solar wind.

Which is an IRL argument against particle weapons in space; they could very well be pointless since spaceships would be dealing with more powerful natural particle sources than anything humanity could create, admittedly a little more spread out than a concentrated beam but still.

Um... vastly more spread out.

Think of it like this. The sun and stars are far more powerful natural light sources than anything humanity can create. This doesn't mean humans can't build laser weapons that will put greater amounts of light on a specific target than the sun and all the stars combined would ever normally apply to it.

The situation is similar with regards to charged particle beams. A defensive system that works against the solar wind will not necessarily work against a concentrated beam of charged particles. Not if that beam is carrying enough energy to harm your ship by heating, let alone by radiation damage. Because it takes significant work to divert such a charged particle beam, and the beam emits radiation in the process of being deflected, some of which strikes your ship.

[Caiaphas]

Because it takes significant work to divert such a charged particle beam, and the beam emits radiation in the process of being deflected, some of which strikes your ship.

Apologies for my ignorance in particle physics, but why would deflecting a particle beam through electromagnetic means (a la EM fields in the LHC, for instance) generate radiation? As in, what is the mechanism (anything like bremsstrahlung)?

[Eternal_Freedom]

I'm no expert on it, but from first principles, you're having to do work (i.e. expend energy) to change the particle beam's direction. Some of that extra energy will be released as heat as is so oftent he case, and while the emission should be omnidirectional a small fraction of that thermal radiation will then strike your own ship.

[Starglider]

I'm no expert on it, but from first principles, you're having to do work (i.e. expend energy) to change the particle beam's direction.

An EM or gravitational field changing the vector of a moving mass does not do work if kinetic energy is conserved, e.g. the particle is elasticly deflected. If incoming particles are braked to a stop then yes work is being done.

[jwl]

Apologies for my ignorance in particle physics, but why would deflecting a particle beam through electromagnetic means (a la EM fields in the LHC, for instance) generate radiation? As in, what is the mechanism (anything like bremsstrahlung)?

I'm no expert on it, but from first principles, you're having to do work (i.e. expend energy) to change the particle beam's direction. Some of that extra energy will be released as heat as is so oftent he case, and while the emission should be omnidirectional a small fraction of that thermal radiation will then strike your own ship.

The actual changing of direction of the particle does not do any work. However, changing a direction is an acceleration, and accelerated charges give off electromagnetic radiation. The name of the effect due to bending from magnetic fields is synchrotron radiation.

If your particle beam is powerful enough, yeah, it should make a difference. But if your desire was to blast your enemy with electromagnetic radiation, why not just do that in the first place, rather than aiming charged particles that create electromagnetic radiation when they hit your enemy's shield? For one thing, that means they can control their magnetic field to decide what kind of radiation they are getting.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ah, that's good to know. Thanks for clearing that up Starglider.

[Simon_Jester]

Apologies for my ignorance in particle physics, but why would deflecting a particle beam through electromagnetic means (a la EM fields in the LHC, for instance) generate radiation? As in, what is the mechanism (anything like bremsstrahlung)?

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... otron.html

Synchrotron radiation is a real thing. It is already occurring in, for example, the LHC, which is a big part of why the LHC machinery and tunnels are now radioactive, will remain so, and will become MORE radioactive.

Bremsstrahllung may also come into play, either separately or at the same time, depending on how the shielding effect actually works. For instance, if you shield yourself using a cloud of plasma bound magnetically to the hull (seriously proposed by a good friend of mine) you will get both effects at once- which is why the spacecraft she envisions using such a system have to be heavily armored with solidly built hulls (bulky enough it takes an Orion drive to power them) just to handle the secondary radiation.

I'm no expert on it, but from first principles, you're having to do work (i.e. expend energy) to change the particle beam's direction.

An EM or gravitational field changing the vector of a moving mass does not do work if kinetic energy is conserved, e.g. the particle is elasticly deflected. If incoming particles are braked to a stop then yes work is being done.

Regardless of whether work is being done, however, force is being exerted, and a corresponding force will be exerted on parts of your hull (particularly the bit that generates the magnetic shield).

As a practical matter, I am fairly sure it is not possible to exert transient forces, forces that come and go, on a structure without dumping some energy into it.