"Energy-sucking antennas:" some email, 1999

   
   Greg East 
   Santee, Ca USA - Sunday, October 24, 1999 at 15:42:45 (PDT)

   I'm new to Weird Science, but not new to strange science phenomena. I
   was quite impressed with Bill's article on "Energy-sucking Radio
   Antennas". Since I've already built a small DC PM motor which
   continuously runs day and night fueled by emissions from a local AM
   radio station, I thought I'd try to augment the system by partially
   invoking the capacitive plate antenna scheme outlined in the above
   paper. I took two 2'X 4' sheet metal plates, one on the ground, the
   other atop a plastic trash can placed on the first piece....separation
   about 1 meter vertical. This big air-capacitor was placed in parallel
   with, an already, carefully tuned loop antenna. This loop antenna is
   configured to store power via germanium and zener diodes and yields
   about 8VDC on a capacitor...enough to occasionally flash a red LED
   when touched to the capacitor. Adding the capacitive antenna and
   re-tuning to best resonance allowed the metal plates to become part of
   the resonant circuit and added a healthy 5 to 6VDC to the capacitor. I
   now have a two-transistor circuit flashing the LED. I was very careful
   to test every hook-up scheme of the plates to insure that they were
   NOT simply adding to the length of the loop portion of the antenna. I
   believe that I have witnessed the action of a resonant capacitive
   plate antenna drawing static charge from the Earth's static field. I
   say this because I did not experience an increase in curent, just an
   increase in voltage.
   
   I highly recommend that you all read Bill's paper on ' Energy-sucking
   antennas' as well as his paper "On the Possibility That
   Electromagnetic Radiation Lacks Quanta of Any Kind -or- photon dies
   screaming". Just thought I'd share.

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Date: Sun, 01 Aug 1999 10:13:46 -0400
From: John Denker 
Subject: Re: teeny atoms absorb huge EM waves
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU

At 02:15 PM 7/29/99 -0700, William Beaty wrote:
>I've always been befuddled by the ability of atoms and molecules to
>intercept waves which are >> than the diameter of the atom.  Those waves
>refuse to pass through an atom-sized pinhole.  Why then are they blocked
>by an atom-sized obstruction?
>
>Here's a possible answer.  In a paper on VLF radio receivers, the authors
>pointed out that small antennas will absorb large amounts of propagating
>EM energy if the antenna is connected to a resonant circuit.  As energy
>builds up in the resonator, an AC field appears around the antenna, and
>this field interacts coherently with the received waves as if the antenna
>was much larger than it actually is.

That's true, and it's part of the answer to your question.

>At first glance this seems silly.  How can an *oscillator* enhance the
>process of EM absorbtion?

It doesn't seem silly to me.  Consider the AR (anti-reflective) coating on
lenses.  How can adding another layer "suck" more light into the lens?
But it does.  It's classic (and classical) wave mechanics.

>A resonant circuit would transmit at the same time it receives!

Absolutely it does.  Any absorber does.  There's a paper by Feynman and
Wheeler on this.  (One of the first scientific papers Feynman ever wrote,
IIRC.)

> At the very least, the waves from such a transmitter
>would simply superpose with the received waves and have no effect.  EM
>fields obey superposition.  By transmitting, I cannot affect the waves
>which are already propagating past my transmitter, since one wave won't
>interact with another.  But wait...  if the transmitter is phase-locked in
>lagging phase with the incoming radiation, then it would partially cancel
>the EM fields of the incoming wave, and the volume of this "cancelling"
>effect would be larger than that of a passive antenna.

Right.  And if you carry out the calculation you just described, you will
derive the optical theorem.  As the name suggests, it is completely
classical wave mechanics.  OTOH since hardly anybody studies classical wave
mechanics any more, you may find it easier to find a discussion in your
quantum mechanics books.

>Aha, EM is *not* linear where power is concerned.  There's an e^2.

That's for sure.

>If the above is true, then at its resonant absorbtion frequency, an atom
>would act much larger than it actually is.  In a wave-based model, the
>atom would be surrounded with oscillating fields, and these fields would
>extend the reach of the tiny atom.  It would behave more like a half-wave
>dipole antenna than like a pinhole where the diameter << wavelength.

That's all true, except for the emphasis on resonance.  In the Born
approximation, the scattering power depends on the size *and* on the depth
of the scattering potential.  You can have a delta-function shaped
scatterer with zero size and quite hefty scattering.   The pinhole
scatterer is small *and* not very deep.

>  Modern radio
>receivers would not employ this effect, since their antennas are decoupled
>from any resonant circuits by the input amplifier stage.  (We want our
>antennas to be relatively broad-band, not sharply tuned.)

Radio receivers wouldn't benefit.  They care about signal-to-noise ratio,
not absolute signal energy.  (To say it another way: nowadays the noise
temperature of the RF preamp is really, really low.)  A tuned antenna would
resonate with noise just as well as signal.  Receivers can cut down the
noise bandwidth electronically just as well as they could with a resonator.

>How would I perform calculations on this system to show that extra energy
>would flow into an oscillating antenna?  Use a numerical simulation of the
>near-field space around a short dipole antenna?  (Gah!)

Read up on
  * Optical theorem
  * Born approximation
  * Hugyhens' construction.  I saw a manuscript that David A. B. Miller
wrote a few years ago on this, showing that the usual hand-wavy version of
H.C. could be made quite rigorous.  I don't know if/where that got
published.  If you can't find it let me know and I'll bug DABM for it.

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Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 14:15:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: William Beaty 
To: list physics teaching 
Subject: teeny atoms absorb huge EM waves


I've always been befuddled by the ability of atoms and molecules to
intercept waves which are >> than the diameter of the atom.  Those waves
refuse to pass through an atom-sized pinhole.  Why then are they blocked
by an atom-sized obstruction?

Here's a possible answer.  In a paper on VLF radio receivers, the authors
pointed out that small antennas will absorb large amounts of propagating
EM energy if the antenna is connected to a resonant circuit.  As energy
builds up in the resonator, an AC field appears around the antenna, and
this field interacts coherently with the received waves as if the antenna
was much larger than it actually is. 

At first glance this seems silly.  How can an *oscillator* enhance the
process of EM absorbtion?  A resonant circuit would transmit at the same
time it receives!  At the very least, the waves from such a transmitter
would simply superpose with the received waves and have no effect.  EM
fields obey superposition.  By transmitting, I cannot affect the waves
which are already propagating past my transmitter, since one wave won't
interact with another.  But wait...  if the transmitter is phase-locked in
lagging phase with the incoming radiation, then it would partially cancel
the EM fields of the incoming wave, and the volume of this "cancelling"
effect would be larger than that of a passive antenna.  Aha, EM is *not*
linear where power is concerned.  There's an e^2.  It's like "antisound," 
where an emitter can act like an absorber or a reflector.  By superposing
another coherent EM field upon the incoming waves, perhaps I can redirect
their Poynting vector field so that it points at my transmitting antenna. 
If I "transmit" coherently from a small antenna, then my transmitter can
act transparent, or like an absorber, or like a reflector, depending upon
the phase of the transmitted wave.  And, since the size of the antenna is
far smaller than one wavelength, the antenna alone would not radiate much
energy except when it is interacting with an incoming wave.

If the above is true, then at its resonant absorbtion frequency, an atom
would act much larger than it actually is.  In a wave-based model, the
atom would be surrounded with oscillating fields, and these fields would
extend the reach of the tiny atom.  It would behave more like a half-wave
dipole antenna than like a pinhole where the diameter << wavelength. 


Has anyone on phys-L encountered this idea?  It seems very weird, but it
does connect with other things I understand about EM.  Modern radio
receivers would not employ this effect, since their antennas are decoupled
from any resonant circuits by the input amplifier stage.  (We want our
antennas to be relatively broad-band, not sharply tuned.)  This resonance
effect, if it exists, should apply to the old "super-regenerative"
detectors.  I'd always assumed that a super-regen radio was simply an
exotic type of amplifier, not a device which actually *receives* more
energy than a passive antenna would. 


How would I perform calculations on this system to show that extra energy
would flow into an oscillating antenna?  Use a numerical simulation of the
near-field space around a short dipole antenna?  (Gah!) 


((((((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billbeskimo.com                                  http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits          science projects, tesla, weird science
Seattle, WA                         freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L

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Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1999 23:01:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: William Beaty 
To: "Forum for Physics Educators" 
Subject: Re: teeny atoms absorb huge EM waves

On Sun, 1 Aug 1999, John Denker wrote:

> At 02:15 PM 7/29/99 -0700, William Beaty wrote:
> >I've always been befuddled by the ability of atoms and molecules to
> >intercept waves which are >> than the diameter of the atom.  Those waves
> >refuse to pass through an atom-sized pinhole.  Why then are they blocked
> >by an atom-sized obstruction?



> >At the very least, the waves from such a transmitter
> >would simply superpose with the received waves and have no effect.  EM
> >fields obey superposition.  By transmitting, I cannot affect the waves
> >which are already propagating past my transmitter, since one wave won't
> >interact with another.  But wait...  if the transmitter is phase-locked in
> >lagging phase with the incoming radiation, then it would partially cancel
> >the EM fields of the incoming wave, and the volume of this "cancelling"
> >effect would be larger than that of a passive antenna.
> 
> Right.  And if you carry out the calculation you just described, you will
> derive the optical theorem.  As the name suggests, it is completely
> classical wave mechanics.  OTOH since hardly anybody studies classical wave
> mechanics any more, you may find it easier to find a discussion in your
> quantum mechanics books.

Bingo, I went to the UW physics library on friday and found some
references on this. One is: 

  Craig F. Bohren, "How can a particle absorb more than the light incident
  on it?"  Am. J. Phys, 51(4)  Apr. 1983  pp 323-327

In his intro, Bohren points out a misconception associated with this
topic:

  To those who first encountered in neutron physics the concept of the
  area that a target presents to a projectile (i.e., its cross section),
  it comes as no suprise that targets can sometimes extend beyond their
  strict geometrical boundaries, even greatly so.  Indeed, the very unit
  for neutron cross sections, the barn, encourages one to think big.  But
  photons are supposed to behave more soberly than neutrons; every
  physics student knows that photons travel through free space mostly in
  straight lines, although they do sometimes exhibit a bit of waywardness
  in the vicinity of edges.  Notions about what photons can and cannot do
  are formed in traditional optics courses, which emphasize visible light
  interacting wtih large bodies, usually transparent.  With time these
  notions become deep-seated prejudices and are often difficult to
  dislodge.  Yet it is incontrovertible that there are many circumstances,
  by no means exotic, under which small particles (smaller than the
  wavelength) can absorb more than the light incident on them.  My first
  task in this paper is to examine some of these circumstances.  Then I
  shall give a pictorial representation of absorbtion of light by a
  particle in a way which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been done
  before.

Bohren goes on to analyze the Poynting field around a small metal sphere
at UV frequencies where surface plasmon resonance cause significant
absorbtion, and around a NaCl sphere at IR frequencies where surface
phonons are the absorbers.  His results are very interesting.  Also
interesting is that there are very few papers on this topic.  Looks like a
possible "hole in physics", where a widespread misconception diverts our
attention from an interesting phenomenon.


> >Aha, EM is *not* linear where power is concerned.  There's an e^2.
> 
> That's for sure.
> 
> >If the above is true, then at its resonant absorbtion frequency, an atom
> >would act much larger than it actually is.  In a wave-based model, the
> >atom would be surrounded with oscillating fields, and these fields would
> >extend the reach of the tiny atom.  It would behave more like a half-wave
> >dipole antenna than like a pinhole where the diameter << wavelength.
> 
> That's all true, except for the emphasis on resonance.  In the Born
> approximation, the scattering power depends on the size *and* on the depth
> of the scattering potential.  You can have a delta-function shaped
> scatterer with zero size and quite hefty scattering.   The pinhole
> scatterer is small *and* not very deep.

Small particles might act as larger scatterers, but doesn't scattering
behave differently near a resonance?

Bohren's paper concentrates on absorbtion rather than scattering.  He
offers a 2D plot of the Poynting field around a tiny aluminum sphere at
the resonant frequency of 8.8eV and at an off-resonance frequency of 5 eV. 
Very interesting!  At the non-resonant frequency, the Poynting field
passes the sphere almost as if it was not there.  The lines of energy-flow
are parallel except within one radius of the sphere, where they
temporarily spread apart and then close behind it without touching its
surface; much like a fluid flow around an object at very low Reynolds
number.  He gives the absorbtion efficiency as 0.1, as if the sphere was
*much smaller* than its geometrical area. 

At resonance, the depicted Poynting field is very different.  Lines of
energy flow which were far from the axis through the sphere are bent
inwards and hit the surface of the sphere.  The sphere is "funneling"
energy into itself and acting as a much larger object.  Bohren estimates
that the absorbtion cross-sectional area is 18 times larger than expected,
and the "absorbtion radius" is 4.2 times greater than the geometrical
radius.

I had suspected that something strange might occur at resonance, but I
didn't expect that an object would act *smaller* than its geometrical size
at off-resonant frequencies. 

((((((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                             SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billbeskimo.com                             http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits          science projects, tesla, weird science
Seattle, WA                         freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L


Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 00:41:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: William Beaty 
To: "Forum for Physics Educators" 
Subject: Re: teeny atoms absorb huge EM waves

On Sun, 1 Aug 1999, John Denker wrote:

> At 02:15 PM 7/29/99 -0700, William Beaty wrote:
> >  Modern radio
> >receivers would not employ this effect, since their antennas are decoupled
> >from any resonant circuits by the input amplifier stage.  (We want our
> >antennas to be relatively broad-band, not sharply tuned.)
> 
> Radio receivers wouldn't benefit.  They care about signal-to-noise ratio,
> not absolute signal energy.  (To say it another way: nowadays the noise
> temperature of the RF preamp is really, really low.)  A tuned antenna would
> resonate with noise just as well as signal.  Receivers can cut down the
> noise bandwidth electronically just as well as they could with a resonator.

Yep, the original article was on VLF/ELF research, where the signals are
low, the bandwidth small, and receivers must use long integration times in
order to get the received energy up above the noise energy of the input
stage.  Increasing the received energy would be useful in this situation. 
Whenever it's inconvenient to add front-end amplifiers to an RF receiver,
and where the antenna is much smaller than one wavelength, we could
increase the "effective size" of the antenna by adding a resonant
circuit.  I've been told that common AM radios use antenna-tuning.  This
clears up a question I've always had about AM radios: how can they get
away with such a small antenna?  Do they simply have immense front-end
gains?  Maybe not.  If their ferrite loop antenna is tuned to the received
frequency, then it will create its own EM field, and take advantage of the
same "energy sucking" effect that atoms use to grab light waves.  A
portable AM radio is like a "giant atom".


> >How would I perform calculations on this system to show that extra energy
> >would flow into an oscillating antenna?  Use a numerical simulation of the
> >near-field space around a short dipole antenna?  (Gah!)
> 
> Read up on
>   * Optical theorem
>   * Born approximation
>   * Hugyhens' construction.  I saw a manuscript that David A. B. Miller
> wrote a few years ago on this, showing that the usual hand-wavy version of
> H.C. could be made quite rigorous.  I don't know if/where that got
> published.  If you can't find it let me know and I'll bug DABM for it.

That reference sounds like it would be a good place to start.

Below is a very crude, 1-dimensional model of a real-world receiving
antenna with and without a resonator.

Suppose I transmit a VLF signal at 1KHZ with a transmitting antenna at 10
megavolts and 100km distance from the receiver.  If my receiving antenna
is a plate suspended 1m from a ground-plane, then we form a capacitive
voltage divider as shown below.  If the receiver antenna's capacitance is
10pF, and the capacitance between that antenna and the transmitter is
1/10,000 times smaller ( 1m / 100Km )  then the signal on the receiver is
100 volts, but with a very large impedance.  I'll put a load resistor on
the receiving antenna that matches the divider's series capacitance (so
that I can draw significant energy from it.)  The divider's capacitance is
dominated by the 10pF between antenna and ground.  This gives a
1/(2*PI*F*C) = 16 megohm load resistor, and it drags the received voltage
down from 100V to 70V.  The energy received by this antenna is 300
microwatts.


  __________  -->
 | 10 MVolt |_______
 | @ 1KHz   |       |
 |__________|       |
    |            ___|___     Capacitance from transmitter to receiver
   _|_                       ( very small, say 1/10,000 pF )
  ////           _______
                    |
                    |
     receiving      |______________    <--- 70.7V @ 1KHz
     antenna        |              |
   (metal plate) ___|___           \
                          10pF     /  16 Megohm
                 _______           \
                    |              /
                    |______________|
                   _|_
                  ////



Now lets add a tuned circuit:

  __________  -->
 | 10 MVolt |_______
 | @ 1KHz   |       |
 |__________|       |
    |            ___|___     Capacitance from transmitter to receiver
   _|_                       ( very small, say 1/10,000 pF )
  ////           _______
                    |
                    |
                    |_____________
                    |            |
    antenna         |             \_ 
   (metal plate) ___|___          (_)
                          10pF    (_) Coil
                 _______          (_)
                    |             (_)
                    |             /
                    |____________|
                    |
                   _|_   1KHz resonance
                  ////


At resonance the 10pF capacitance vanishes, since an ideal parallel-
resonant circuit looks like an infinite resistor.  The capacitive
voltage-divider is no longer there.  How high will the antenna's voltage
rise?  To ten megavolts!  (But only if we stay with this crude 1-D model.) 
If the coil's resistance is very small (Q is incredibly high) then the
voltage on the tuned circuit will rise until it reaches the same voltage
relative to ground as the distant transmitter.

However, voltage is not power, and it might take months to build up that
much voltage across an ideal resonator.  Let's put a resistor across the
tuned circuit so we create a flow of real energy and drag the voltage down
to .707 of the unloaded voltage.  The resistance should equal the
impedance of the series capacitance ( 10 ^ -16 uF) or 1600 giga-ohms. 
Power intercepted by the previous receiver was 300 microwatts.  In this
receiver it has risen to 30 watts, or ten thousand times higher than the
earlier circuit which lacked a resonator. 

Now for my dirty secret.  The original paper was:

  J. Sutton and C. Spaniol, "An Active Antenna for ELF Magnetic Fields", 
  PROCEEDINGS OF THE 1990 INTERNATIONAL TESLA SYMPOSIUM.
  Also: NASA PDF doc, Appendix D,Sutton/Spaniol broadband VLF antenna

It was inspired by N. Tesla's scheme for transmitting significant
electrical energy without wires.  Throughout his writings, Tesla harps on
the fact that his small resonant receivers "draw energy" from incoming EM
waves.  Now I'm finally starting to see what Tesla was talking about.  The
"absorbtion radius" of antennas which are far smaller than a wavelength
can be greatly increased by connecting them to a high-Q resonant
circuit.

Tesla's wireless-power idea sounds crazy, yet apparently it employs the
same physics whereby tiny atoms can absorb/radiate EM waves of wavelengths
thousands of times larger than the diameter of the atom.

Here's another way to look at it.  If a ground-referenced antenna wire
intercepts a particular displacement-current from an EM wave, it will
develop a particular voltage relative to ground, and if V and I are in
phase (resistor load), then the total absorbed power is V*I.  The power is
tiny, as would be expected from a normal radio antenna.  Now if we were to
artificially impress a large AC voltage on the antenna with the same phase
as before, and if the same displacement-current is still intercepted by
the antenna, then V*I is greatly increased because V is greatly increased.
Voltage is not energy, and if the antenna is far smaller than one
wavelength (which limits energy loss by RF emission), we need very little
energy to put a huge voltage on our receiving antenna, yet the energy
absorbtion rate is dramatically increased.  A resonator stores the
received energy and uses it to create a huge AC voltage on the antenna
wire, and therefor to "funnel" or "suck" energy out of the EM wave.

Here's another reference, and a portion of the paper's intro paragraph:

  H. Paul and R. Fischer  "Light Absorbtion by a dipole", SOV. PHYS. USP.,
  26(10)  Oct. 1983  pp 923-926

  In the so-called semiclassical radiation theory the atoms are described
  quantum mechanically, while the radiation field is considered as a
  classical quantity.  Such a treatment appears to be justified in case of
  strong fields, as they are, in particular, generated by lasers.  (In
  fact, this procedure has proved to be very successful in Lamb's famous
  gas laser theory(1).)  Specifically, in the process of light absorption
  by a two-level atom in the physical picture provided by the
  semiclassical theory is as follows: The field induces and oscillating
  electric dipole moment, in the sense of a quantum mechanical expectation
  value, on the atom, and the total energy flow into the atom is given by
  the work done by the field on that dipole.  Note that in this model
  absorption appears as a continuous process.  This description of
  light absortion is in close correspondence to classical electrodynamics,
  the main difference, however, being that the amplituide of the induced
  dipole moment, contrary to that of a harmonic oscillator, can grow, with
  time, up to a maximum value only (given by the transistion matrix
  element for the electric dipole operator), irrespective of how intense
  the incident field might be.  Clearly, this feature reflects the
  saturation effect present in a two-level system.

  When calculating the energy flow into the atom, along the lines 
  mentioned, one arrives at the result that its maximum value 
  (corresponding to the maximum value of the induced dipole moment) is
  larger, by orders of magnitude, than the energy flow in the
  (undisturbed)incident field throught the geometric atomic cross section.
  (A typical example is presented in Sec. III.)  From this, one must
  conclude that an atom has the ability to "suck up" energy from a spatial
  region that is by far larger than its own volume.  One might put the
  question as to the underlying specific physical mechanism.  Acutally, an
  answer is readily given in the framework of classical electrodynamics.
  An oscillating dipole generates a wave, in any case, the difference
  between absorbtion and emission, as a net result, being brought about
  only by the different phase relations between the incident and the
  emitted wave.  Specifically, in the absorptive case this phase relation
  gives rise to the effect that the lines of energy flow in the total
  field are "bent" in a rather large neighborhood of the atom such as to
  direct the energy flow into the atom. It is the aim of the present
  paper to give a detailed picture, based on a numerical study, of this
  bending phenomenon which has been discussed qualitatively already by
  Fleming(2). 


So, apparently black holes aren't the only thing in physics that "suck"!

:)


((((((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billbeskimo.com                                  http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits          science projects, tesla, weird science
Seattle, WA                         freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L





Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 15:04:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: William Beaty 
To: sciclub-list@eskimo.com
Subject: tiny atoms emit huge light waves?

Mark Kinsler  07/29 5:07 PM wrote:

> Insofar as I know, atoms do not absorb long wave radiation.  They'll
> absorb light and x-rays and frequencies that are on the order of their
> size, but I don't think they do much of anything at, say, UHF. 

By "long wave" I mean wavelengths which are far larger than the size of
atoms.  Aren't atoms much MUCH smaller than optical wavelengths?  Now I'll
have to make certain of this by looking for a reference which quotes the
diameters of various neutral atoms. 

If I'm remembering correctly, atoms are on the order of a fraction of a
nanometer across, while the wavelength of their emission spectra is
hundreds or thousands of times larger than this.  How can such small
antennas emit large amounts of EM energy?  Perhaps the nonlinearity of QM
explains the mystery.  Or perhaps am I wrong about the diameter of atoms,
and instead am remembering the typical lattice-spacing of solids rather
than the approximate diameter of individual atoms?  If most atoms are
hundreds of nanometers across, then there is no mystery here. 

QM might explain how small atoms can emit large waves, but "Quantized" is
not necessarily "nonlinear."  A single-frequency photon behaves as a
sinusoidal EM wave of infinite temporal extent, just like an AM radio
tower broadcasting a blank carrier.  No glitches in the time domain, even
though that photon is radiated and absorbed in essentially zero time.  I
note that Laser light acts linear, like radio waves, and produces nice
smooth sinusoidal interference fringes even though the image of those
fringes might be composed of pointlike photon interactions on the
film/phosphor/retina.  Nonsinusoidal periodic waves and especially pulses
are nonlinear, but both of these possess broad spectra.  An extremely
narrow spectrum usually signifies a linear process and a high-q resonator,
therefor I maintain my suspicions that the narrow emission spectra of
atoms is *not* entirely explained by appeals to the nonlinear character of
quantized interactions.  If atomic emission acted nonlinear, then the
lines of an emission spectrum would not be so narrow.  Something is weird
here. 

Are atoms like antennae, or like photon-guns?  If a system can be usefully
modeled using either waves or particles, then the probability functions of
the particle-based model are no more nonlinear than the EM fields of the
wave-based model.  However, I rarely hear people seriously discussing
atoms as if they were tiny antennae.  They mention this, but don't ever go
into details.  This seems odd to me.  As a result, when I encounter talk
about tiny antennae which absorb radiation with unexpected efficiency, it
makes me sit up and take notice, because *perhaps* it answers some
questions I have regarding a wave-oriented model of atomic
emission/absorbtion. 

Tiny pinholes will not pass light if the wavelength >> pinhole diameter. 
Conversely, tiny particles should not efficiently absorb light if the
particle diameter is >> wavelength.  How do atoms do it? 


((((((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billbeskimo.com                                  http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits          science projects, tesla, weird science
Seattle, WA                         freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L