Dear Readers

I found that optical sensors can be used as magnetometers and gravimeters. But the off-the-shelf optical devices are meant for photons and not for tracking fluctuating magnetic and gravitational fields.

I found all the groups designing gravimeters and measuring magnetic fields at low frequencies. The gravimeters use various test masses with atom interferometer and atomic cantilevers being common for next generation devices. But no one was looking at electron fluctuations. So I started looking to see what was needed to use electrons to measure acceleration fields.

If you move an electron, it will give off a tiny gravitional wave, and a much large electric field which can cause accelerations. If the electron moves on its own, then its accelaration is the result of an acceleration field made up of many spatial frequencies.

So the electrons escaping from an electron well in a CMOS device can reveal the statistics on accelerations. If the signal from a well in a darkened optical sensor correlates with sferics (lightning) strokes, then that can be added to the list of signals it can detect. If the signal correlates with local and distant magnetic fields, or with low frequency electric fields, then those can sometime (often) be identified and added to the signals that occur and can the sensor optimized for that purpose. If the signal correlates with low frequency magnetic variations that can be correlated with human electromagnetic sources, that can be added. If it correlates with earthquakes, or ocean waves breaking in the beach, or atmospheric currents, or the gravitational poptential (and gradient of the gravitational potential) of the sun and moon, those can be added. It is purely a matter of sensitivity, numbers of measurements and careful attention to natural and human sources and specific fields for calibrations.

So my question is this. I have not found any CMOS sensor or large arrays of electron wells where I would have careful control over the amplifier gain and timing to tune the emission rate from a darkened electron well. And I want to randomly sample at precise times so I can use time of flight methods to localize, image and characterize sources. If it is mostly magnetic, fine, there are magnetic sources. If it is mostly electric field or energy density, or temperature or infrasound. I do not care. They can all be sorted out better with precise control over the sample.

I have looked at many audio and video amplifier and ADC systems and devices. None of them are set up well to gather detailed statistics, create good filtering algorithms, then run those algorithms to separate the data stream into many useful categories.

I am talking about the whole thing. What I want to ask is there a way to get an "optical sensor" made that does not use visible or infrared or UV photons? It just needs electron wells, very fine control over each well (24 bit for that many levels)? It needs high sampling rate ADCs (Mega Samples per Second Msps) or Gsps. The sampling rate set the spatial resolution. If you are doing a speed of gravity experiment you need enough unique signals to make the correlations, and the times need to be precise, if you want to add decimals to your result.

I looked at row by row sampling. A 1024x1024x30 fps device taken a row at a time is 30720 samples per second of 1024 electron wells. That is 2.99792458E8/30720 = 9768.9 meters per sample. A 10 km resolution magnetic scan of the interior of the earth is useful. The same resolution might be good for the magnetosphere.

This same set of wells, sampled at 100 wells per sample will be 307,200 sps and give 0.97689 km spatial resolution. The contraint on sample size is the bit size of the samples. If you have a 12 bit ADC, but do not set the input to use the whole range, that would give a few bits of sensitivity. If you can use thousands of samples per reading, then finer and finer signals can be investigated.

Now since it is not an optical sensor, it could be made in multiple layers. The Fovean? device has three layers but they assume a photon stream. A low frequency magnetic field or electromagnetic field or gravitational field is usually not going to be attentuated. So a physical stack would be an advantage for some signals.

A Faraday cage will dampen the electromagnetic field, and varying electric fields that are not propagating. Magnetic fields in the near field are hard to stop, but easy to measure precisely with other sensors. Using time of flight with clusters of these devices can make it easy to say precisely where the signals are coming from. Is that hard? Not really. I call it "not hard, just tedious". Meaning it is conceptually easy, it just takes time to sort things out. I find it easy, and there are people way better at that than me - lightning detection networks, VLBI networks, radar and sonar and time of flight camera developers, even LIGO with their gravitational potential detectors. TOF is exploding with new devices.

I am hoping someone will know how to do any part of what I am describing and will try it. I wanted to use off the shelf camera sensors that can do megaregions per second with their region of interest on chip sensing. But I am too tired to wade through tens of thousands of pages of documentation, and usually finding there is not enough to actually know if it does what they say, let alone will be suitable for this sort of thing.

You can look at my project updates. I want to create what I call "gravitational engineering". More, I want to have much more precise control over electric, magnetic, velocity, and acceleration fields. The devices and computers are able to do much of what is needed. But it takes people to teach the electronics what to do.

So are there companies or labs that make and characterize electron well devices? Do they know how to use time of flight methods? Do they know how to interconvert electromagnetic and gravitational field equations and units for practical purposes?

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation