Terry,
IOW "very little energy" per unit volume can amount to substantial energy when it is withdrawn rapidly and instantaneously replinished.
Well, yeah, understood; but, if you're right, we should be able to find a 170 mm process. I just getting ahead of myself here.
Yes - I see - that would be seem to be true, and maybe usable... IF we could find a very mobile molecule as a "medium" which had a resonance there. Is there one? Oviously the answer is the one which "caused" the radiation in the first palce. I think that particular "window" in the graph - at around 150 GHz is due to water vapor - which is indeed a possibility to pursue.
However the water molecule is about 9 times less "mobile" in terms of being able to have a collision rate, under coantainment, which is in sync with its much higher resonance - big problem. Not to mention dissociation - which could be just what you want - but is that possible to do easily?
Hydrogen seems to be uniquely placed in having these overlapping traits:
1) a resonance point that is easy to achieve spatially, since the 21 cm wavelength is a size which fits in nicely with many existing lab items and tubes. 2) a resonance point that is easy to harness electronically - being microwave - it can be reflected without much loss and contained within the same resonant structure, so that a standing or travelling wave results (i.e. coherency) and being "cold" in its peak energy, it will not melt the container. 3) a very high mobility molecule, so that it can have a high collision rate at relatively low heat, even at reduced initial pressure. If the collision rate must be the same as its EM resonance, then 150 GHz is much more difficult to achieve in a gas, it would seem, as the structure would be subject to melt. Helium is mobile but has no isomer. Neon, O2 and N2 are not so mobile. Hydrogen seems to be the only option with high mobility and a low resonance, such that the two can get in sync - with water as a possibility.
4) an exploitable QM spread of energies in the isomer .....With the usual (substantial) caveats, of course.... Jones
