Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-34954086-20120922085545/@comment-34954086-20130116015358

Not YJ, still Superhero.

Iron Man's Repulsors
They are described as "directed beta particle beams", beta particles are simply electrons, and while we already have "electron guns", these arent repulsor blasters, they're the cathodes ray tubes in old tvs. It can move a pinwheel, barely, not blow through a wall.

So, say you want to increase the power. Cathode Rays work by running current through a source of beta particel decay. It can have an increased rate by increasing current. This would increase the force. But, it would burn out the source, it would decay far too quickly.

So there has to be a new source for the beta particles, and a way of directing them.

I'd thought about this for a while, but I had an ephipany on this. Electrons are present all around us, the air we breath, is filled with molecules in a state of matter where Electrons are easiest to seperate due to their higher energy then solids.

When Lightning strikes, the air is ionised, the electrons being freed entirely from the protons into a "soup" of superheated charged particles, this is Plasma. Plasma does not last long before the atoms reform, just enough expend the high energy required to seperate them.

Iron Man does not make Lightning, that's Thor's thing. However, Electrons only need to be supplied the energy through some means. In lightning, it's through the potential difference causing a rapid (high velocity) electron flow. Electrons are affected by magnetic or electric fields, deflecting them. Their repulsion from a negatively charged Electric field could be used to supply the eletrons with sufficient velocity to escape their Atoms if it is powerful enough. This would produde essentially an omnidirectional blast of electrons from his hands.

To direct it to the beam we see, well, there are a number of ways. Basically, Magnets.