A potential barrier arises naturally between alternating - 1/3 and + 2/3 charge sequences: Implications for nuclear fusion

Nuclear fusion is the source of the sun’s energy, and billions of dollars have been invested in bringing fusion power home to planet Earth. Understanding how to overcome the Coulomb potential energy barrier is the central challenge. The recently-published magnetic ‘Coulomb’ barrier apparatus provides a pre-university classroom demonstration of an analogous magnetic potential energy barrier. The goal of this follow-on manuscript is to extend and transform the simplistic magnetic model into a representational electrostatic model useful to undergraduate and graduate students drawn to the challenge of controlled nuclear fusion. In light of Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, this paper first presents an electrostatic analog of the magnetic “Coulomb” barrier. This establishes a causal link between alternating/unequal charge and the manifestation of a force barrier similar to the barrier demonstrated by the magnet model. Then, using the method described in US Patent 11,087,920 B2, a potential barrier is shown to arise quite naturally from opposing sequences of equally spaced, alternating -1/3e and +2/3e charge (the equivalents of quark charge) when these charges occur at regular intervals equal to the proton’s radius. These surprising findings support the hypothesis that quarks alternate in average positions within the nucleus. The average quark position hypothesis is then applied to deuteron-deuteron’ fusion, which demonstrates how the Coulomb barrier height depends on the orientation of each reactant as they approach one another. An antiparallel approach indicates a Coulomb barrier height less than half that of the axial approach. Given that the deuteron is an electric dipole, conducting fusion within a strong magnetic or electric field may control reactant orientation and lead to higher fusion efficiency.