alt Hacker NewsThere are much easier and cheaper ways of generating megavolts of electricity, I think the biggest barrier would be getting someone who knows enough about this to build it despite their skepticism about the validity of it.
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dotancohen • 01/21/2025
That is what grants are for. And DARPA when something more specific, like this, is to be investigated.
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jacoblambda • 01/21/2025
Sure but for creating fairly uniform/gradual fields of static electricity over a large space?
Electrostatic precipitators exist but they aren't large. Everything else I'm aware of that works on larger scales fails to satisfy the uniform/gradual aspect.
I remember hearing about this in the mid 2000s, someone at Brookhaven (US DOE/Army) jumped on filing a patent for it and dubbed it a plasma window.
They found a use for it in particle accelerators to partition off sections that are under vacuum