Black technology starts from the steel suit

Chapter 243 Chapter 243 Paving the way for the fourth generation of nuclear technology

The research of theoretical physics is not useless, even a trivial formula has its unique features.

Looking at the things in front of him, Wang Feng thought of this for the first time.

When did you start paying attention to theory?

Wang Feng asked himself in his heart.

Maybe it started from studying a certain problem to researching a certain type of problem!
He started from electrochemistry, so he knows electrochemistry best.It is precisely because of the boredom of solving a certain problem over and over again that I thought why not solve a class of problems so that "ordinary people" can also solve those specific problems?

If this is the case, it means that I can have more time to think and solve problems that interest me.

Later, after I discovered the problem of the lithium battery capacity limit, I turned to study physics, hoping to solve this problem physically.

Then I discovered the energy code hidden between the weak interaction and the electromagnetic force!
By the way, the problem of radioactive nuclear waste produced by nuclear fission was also solved later, which is considered a windfall.

Later, Director Lu found himself hoping that he could serve as the person in charge of the development of fourth-generation nuclear technology, which was obviously beyond his capabilities.

Fourth-generation nuclear technology, like nuclear fusion, is a problem for the engineering department, not an academic problem. This is obviously not something he can solve.

And he had a vague guess. He felt that the key to solving the energy problem did not lie in engineering and material dealers, but in theoretical breakthroughs.

Whether it is a steam engine or an internal combustion engine, it is inseparable from the support of Newton's classical mechanics system.

The large-scale application of electric power is inseparable from electromagnetic induction. After HC Oersted discovered the magnetic effect of current in 1820, many physicists tried to find its inverse effect to see if electric energy could be generated in this way.

Michael Faraday raised the question of whether magnetism can generate electricity and whether magnetism can act on electricity. In 1822, when DFJ Arago and A.von Humboldt were measuring the strength of the earth's magnetism, they accidentally discovered that metal had a damping effect on the vibration of nearby magnetic needles.

In 1824, Arago conducted a copper plate experiment based on this phenomenon and found that the rotating copper plate would drive the

The freely suspended magnetic needle rotates, but the rotation of the magnetic needle is not synchronized with the copper disk, lagging behind slightly.Electromagnetic Damping and Electromagnetics
Drive is the earliest discovered electromagnetic induction phenomenon, but because it does not directly manifest as induced current, it was not recognized at that time.

to illustrate.

In August 1831, M. Faraday wound two coils on both sides of the soft iron ring, one of which was a closed circuit, and a magnetic needle was placed in a row near the lower end of the wire, and the other was connected to a battery pack and connected to a switch to form a power supply. closed back

road.

The experiment found that when the switch is turned on, the magnetic needle deflects; when the switch is turned off, the magnetic needle deflects in the opposite direction, which shows that when there is no electricity

An induced current appears in the coil of the pool pack.Faraday immediately realized that this was a non-constant transient effect.
answer.Immediately afterwards, he did dozens of experiments, and summarized the situations of induced current into five categories: changing electric current
current, a changing magnetic field, a constant current in motion, a moving magnet, a conductor moving in a magnetic field, and put this

These phenomena are officially named electromagnetic induction.

This is the discovery of electromagnetic induction, which paved the way for the large-scale use of electricity in later generations.

Next is nuclear energy. At the most core and theoretical level, the theoretical guidance of nuclear energy is Einstein's mass-energy equation E=MC.

Whether it is fusion or fission, atomic nuclei will produce mass losses during the process of polymerization and fission, and these mass losses will be converted into energy and released.

The energy released is the mass loss produced by the process of changing the number of neutrons and protons in the nucleus multiplied by the square of the speed of light.

Among the elements in nature, atomic nuclei with large mass are easier to split, and atomic nuclei with small mass are easier to aggregate together.Therefore, nuclear fission generally uses elements with heavy nuclei such as uranium, plutonium, etc.; nuclear fission uses very light elements such as hydrogen isotopes tritium, deuterium or helium isotopes helium 3 and so on.

It is expected that nuclear fusion or nuclear fission can be achieved using a relatively "relaxed" reaction environment.This is the source of nuclear energy: When the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus changes, mass loss will occur. According to Einstein's mass-energy equation, these lost masses will be converted into a certain amount of energy. Nuclear energy refers to these energies.

From this we can see that several revolutions in the energy world are inseparable from breakthroughs in the theoretical field.

Of course, although the way we use these energy sources is still quite primitive, mainly by boiling water, don't underestimate the matter of boiling water.

The medium of water will enter a supercritical state at an atmospheric pressure of 22.115MPa and above 374.15°C, and its heat capacity, solubility, etc. will change greatly.In order to improve the heat conversion efficiency, supercritical water is now generally used as the heat transfer medium.

Of course, there is also ultra-supercritical water as a heat transfer medium, but the quantity is relatively small and the cost is high!

There are two ways to obtain nuclear energy: fission energy and fusion energy.The problem with fission energy is that the chain reaction is more difficult to control. You must know that once the fission starts, the neutrons emitted after atomic fission will hit other fission atoms. The reaction is not linear, but the expansion of geometric progression, so control the chain more difficult to respond;
The problem with fusion is that the fusion conditions are very harsh, and the strong interaction between two hydrogen nuclei must be broken and merged into two proton helium nuclei.According to calculations, the ignition temperature of the sun is 800 million Kelvin, which requires hundreds of thousands of atmospheres. However, because artificial nuclear fusion devices cannot achieve such a large pressure value, they can only be forced to increase the reaction temperature to [-] million degrees.

In fact, generally speaking, regardless of fusion or fission, artificially controlling the reaction conditions for a long time is the technical difficulty.

The most fundamental theoretical basis of nuclear energy is that changes in the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus (increase in fusion and decrease in fission) will cause mass loss.And the square of the lost mass multiplied by the speed of light is the energy released in the nuclear reaction, which is nuclear energy.After the energy is absorbed by the medium, it is reflected in the temperature of the medium.

To be honest, these conditions are very harsh, so harsh that we can hardly complete them.Let’s talk about nuclear fission first. Although uranium itself has a lot of quality, not all nuclides can be used to generate electricity.

The nuclides that can be used to generate electricity are only 0.7%, which means that most of the rest cannot be used, or to be precise, they cannot be used to generate electricity.

It's not that they can't be used to generate electricity, but the conditions are more harsh, and humans haven't found any useful tools to develop them.

As for nuclear fusion, don’t mention it.

Wang Feng has a vague feeling that the key to solving these problems is not in engineering and materials science, or not only in this.

Turning his head to look at the "Yang-Mills Equation General Solution and Mass Gap" on the information, his intuition told him that the key to solving the problem should be there.

Let's start with an introduction to the Yang-Mills equation.The Yang-Mills equation is an important differential equation, which refers to the Euler-Lagrange equation determined by the Yang-Mills action.

Young's theory is a gauge theory based on the SU(N) group, or more generally, a compact, semi-simple Lie group.Chenning Yang, Mills theory aims to describe the behavior of elementary particles using these non-Abelian Lie groups and the unified core of electromagnetic and weak forces (i.e., U(1)×SU(2)) and the strong force of quantum chromodynamic theory (based on SU(3)).Thus forming the basis of our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The approximate history of the Yang-Mills equation research is as follows: Regarding the Yang-Mills gauge field, we must also start with the electromagnetic field.We all know that magnets attract iron filings.This is because there is a magnetic field between the magnet and the filings.Light is also an electromagnetic field, but it is a wave type, while the above mentioned is a static type.

The Yang-Mills field is the generalization of the electromagnetic field.It is nonlinear, which is the same as Einstein's field equations, which are nonlinear partial differential equations.The contribution of Yang Zhenning and Mills in 1954 was to extend the gauge field and apply it to the interaction of elementary particles, which resulted in the idea of ​​unifying the strong force and the weak force.

But the earliest concept of gauge fields can be traced back to Maxwell's equations.However, the starting point of symmetry was proposed by the German mathematical and theoretical physicist H. Weyl.After Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915 linked gravity with the geometry of space-time, he and many physicists wanted to geometrize the electromagnetic field, thereby further unifying the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field.

Weyl's research was in this direction.He introduced the concept of phase transformation, resulting in the existence of gauge fields.Starting from the symmetry point of view and based on the invariance of norms, the norm field will naturally appear.

To put it simply, if at any time-space point, we allow the phase transformation to follow the symmetry transformation, then the phase transformations of these countless different time-space points must be linked together, and this work must be performed by a field, which is the so-called gauge field .

Yang Zhenning had a deep understanding of the gauge invariance principle around 1950, and clearly understood the importance of the gauge field in quantum physics.Weyl's gauge field is an electromagnetic field, which is based on the commutable U(1) symmetry group.

With regard to the strong force of protons and neutrons at that time, Heisenberg had proposed the irrecommutable SU (2) group as a suitable symmetry group.Knowing its importance, Yang Zhenning spent about four years promoting the SU (2) gauge field.That is, the Yang-Mills theory was given in 1954.

The Yang-Mills equation field equation is non-linear and is an extension of the linear Maxwell equation.Maxwell's equations encompass all of electromagnetism.From Maxwell's equations (1860) to Yang-Mills equations (1954), it took 94 years.

Yang Zhenning has a profound understanding of gauge field theory, and has made an immortal contribution by fully displaying the principle of local gauge invariance.Only two years later, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao proposed the law of parity non-conservation.And it was verified by Wu Jianxiong that it was correct.Thus won the Nobel Prize.

However, the Yang-Mills theory did not win the Nobel Prize, which is a pity.Because Yang-Mills theory is highly consistent with experiments.Why it didn’t win is not clear.

However, Einstein did not win an award for the theory of relativity, but the theory of relativity is also very consistent with the experiment.Considering it in this way, it is also understandable why Yang did not win the award.But times are different.When Einstein was alive, many experiments on the general theory of relativity could not be done.Gravitational waves are what it predicted, but it has only been confirmed in the last 2 years.

In fact, the Yang-Mills theory was not taken seriously at first.That is, in early 1954, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills extended the concept of quantum electrodynamics to non-Abelian gauge groups, and expanded the original gauge theory of commutative groups (applied quantum electrodynamics) to non-commutative groups to explain the strong interaction. .

The Yang-Mills idea was criticized by Pauli because the quantum of the Yang-Mills theory must have mass zero to maintain gauge invariance.If its particle mass is zero, its effect is long-range force.However, the effect of long-range force was not observed experimentally.

Until 1960, when Goldstone [effrey Goldstone], South [Yoichiro Nambu] and Giovanni Jona-Lasinio [Giovanni jona - lasinio] and others began to use the mechanism of symmetry breaking, from In the theory of zero-mass particles, the importance of Yang-Mills theory is revealed.

This has sparked a wave of research on Yang-Mills theory, demonstrating that both theories successfully apply electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics (QCD).The Unified Standard Model combines the strong and electroweak interactions (unifying the weak and electromagnetic interactions) through the symmetry group SU(2)×U(1)×SU(3).

Yang-Mills theory is hailed as the most important achievement in theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century, and it is the basis of modern gauge field theory.Through the ideas of spontaneous symmetry breaking and asymptotic freedom, the theory gradually developed into today's Standard Model.

From a practical point of view, the Yang-Mills equation has achieved great success, but its corresponding mathematical theory has not been established, especially the 'quality gap assumption' that needs to be determined mathematically.

This hypothesis provides an explanation for why electrons have mass.A complete resolution of the mass gap hypothesis would provide a rigorous theoretical justification, while also benefiting physicists.Previously, physicists could only observe that electrons have mass, but they could not explain where the mass of electrons came from.

If we can solve this problem, and explain where the electron's mass comes from, we might be able to resolve some of the imperfections in the Standard Model.

Of course, it may not be possible to unify the strong interaction and electromagnetic force, and then complete the unification of physics!

At the same time, a bigger step is taken for the study of nuclear energy!
For example, it is possible to easily solve the problems encountered in the fourth-generation nuclear technology. Regardless of engineering and materials science, it is very likely to solve this problem fundamentally. For example, there is no need to use fast neutrons to bombard uranium-238, so that This becomes plutonium 239, which can undergo spontaneous fission.
Instead, it can directly cause the fission reaction of uranium 238!

Even more beautifully thought out, maybe the key to solving controllable nuclear fusion is also inside!

(End of this chapter)