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During the Reagan years the government funded many projects under the
"Star Wars Missile Defense System". One of the projects was to
construct
an electron beam at several GeV energies consisting of a chain of
pulses that would tunnel its way through the atmosphere with each
succesive pulse clearing the way ( basically making a region of reduced
air density)for the one after it. The beam would be able travel 100 of
times further than normal. Each pulse consisted of kilolamps of
electrons generating a huge magnetice field that would self focus the
beam through the air. This was built and tested at LLNL in Livermore CA
using a 50 MeV, not GeV, beam about 15 years ago. It never worked.
When
the beam was sent out into the air various instabilities dominated its
behavior. I do not know the current state of the art of this type of
plasma/beam physics. A lot of theoretical work was also done at the
Naval Research Laboratory.
Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
Does it make any sense to think that a very large number of electrons
(billions) can stay together (despite the mutual repulsion) when they
circulate rapidly forming a small "toroidal vortex?" The nonuniform
magnetic field, created by them, is said to produce confining forces.
It would be like a large "classical" atom without a nucleus (a cluster
of charges, if you prefer).