A Cycling Spacecraft for Harvesting Antimatter from the Sun: Magnetic-Funnel Capture, Species-Selective Trapping, and a Laser-Propelled Sun–Earth Service Architecture (v4)
Published in Physics
. This work presents version 4 (v4) of a closed-loop cycling spacecraft that repeatedly dives into the closest practical solar orbit, funnels escaping solar positrons with a high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnetic nozzle, safely deposits the trapped antimatter at an orbital storage station near Earth, and then returns to the Sun under laser propulsion. Four principal improvements over earlier versions are defined: (i) an HTS magnetic funnel with effective radius raised to ~ 700 km; (ii) a two-stage species-selective intake (an E×B Wien filter followed by rotating-wall cyclotron resonance) that rejects protons and heavy ions; (iii) a bank of 256 rotating-wall Penning–Malmberg trap cassettes with contact-free station hand-off; and (iv) a laser-propulsion system fed by an L1 relay-mirror beamed-energy corridor. We show quantitatively that the positron survival time in a sparse plasma scales inversely with density (τ = 1/(nₑ⟨σv⟩)), supporting the view that escaping positrons in the outer corona and solar wind can survive at collectable scales. With full honesty we emphasise that, even for the upgraded system, the near-term yield is research-grade (microgram scale, upper bound) rather than energy-grade.
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