What Is a Particle-Beam Weapon?
The characteristic that distinguishes the particle-beam weapon from other directed energy weapons is the form of energy it propagates. While there are several operating concepts for particle-beam weapons, all such devices generate their destructive power by accelerating sufficient quantities of subatomic particles or atoms to velocities near the speed of light and focusing these particles into a very high-energy beam. The total energy within the beam is the aggregate energy of the rapidly moving particles, each particle having kinetic energy due to its own mass and motion. Currently, the particles being used to form the beam are electrons, protons, or hydrogen atoms. Each of these particles can be illustrated through a schematic of the hydrogen atom, the smallest and simplest of all atoms. (See Figure 1.) The nucleus of the hydrogen atom is a proton, which weighs some 2000 times as much as the electron that orbits the single-proton nucleus. Each proton has an electric charge of a posit
