Question About Frequency Limitations(electronics)

[Padawan]

What I want to do is emit radiation at extremely high frequencies, far into the gamma ray region, for research purposes and industrial purposes.

 

So what I'm thinking about is making an antenna and using an extremely low(and I mean extremely, extremely low) capacitance capacitor.

 

In theory it should increase the frequency of my antenna directly proportional to how low the capacitance is.

 

So the problem I'm thinking about is this: if I decrease the capacitance low enough that the frequency is greater than the number of electrons traveling through my antenna, would it simply stop?

 

I mean, if the frequency is high enough, greater than the number of electrons traveling through the antenna, would it simply not transmit anything at all?

 

Or would the electrons individually carry their own oscillating electromagnetic field?

 

 

I'm afraid there might be a limitation on this approach towards the maximum possible frequency. I'm hoping there isn't because if there isn't I could potentially emit radiation high enough to create particles like the Higgs boson, and Z boson, and other particles, and that could be potentially extremely valuable for the purposes of both research, and possible industrial applications(such as warp drive, due to the control of gravity via the paired production of Higgs bosons used for creating a compressed piece of spacetime in front, and expanded form of spacetime in back. Aclubierre drive.)

 

If this doesn't work I'll have to figure out another approach towards generating high frequency radiation.

[Koodrayso]

So my first thought is no, that this would not be possible via antenna. The theory I've heard is that once the frequency becomes high enough, the electricity will start to only stay on the surface of the antenna, called a skin effect. Most likely, the antenna would melt before any sub-nuclear particles are emitted.

Now, I'm not discouraging you from going for it, for I could be totally wrong. And that's what breakthroughs are all about right. Doing something previously thought impossible. Not to get controversial, but Tesla did lots of high-frequency research. It's hard to find a lot of information about his experiments though because a lot of his work was burned away.

If the capacitor direction doesn't work remember that there are lots of ways to create high frequency. Just remember that the amount of power it takes to create/separate mass into things like higgs bosons is extremely large. If you have the electrical resources, go for it!

Also make sure you have some kind of safety measure in place. You don't want to get radiation poisoning if you emmit x-rays or something. Good luck!

[Padawan]

Thanks,

[John Cuthber]

Sorry, but it's never going to work.

Imagine you have a capacitor and a "signal generator" that can generate the signal you are after (about 10^19 Hz).

You connect the output of the generator to the capacitor and electricity flows into the capacitor. About 10^-19 seconds later the electric charge traveling at roughly the speed of light has traveled something like 10pm, about 1/100000 of the size of a typical nucleus. Then the signal generator changes polarity and starts to remove charge from the capacitor. Of ourse,most of the capacitor has yet to receive any indication of the charge coming in yet. In essense if the capacitor is bigger than the wavelength of the signal you are looking at then it stops working as a capacitor.

Similar problems occur with trying to make the antenna- it has to be vastly smaller than the nucleus of an atom to work as s simple dipole emitter.

Then there's the problem that no electronic device can switch anything like that fast, the best we can do is milimetre wave stuff and you want something like a million times faster.