Electron-cloud behaviour
Shaping the charge distribution in conductors and dielectrics under drive, and what it costs to hold a shape.
Lab
Open questions, kept on the bench.
The lab is where Blixt spends its own money. These are the threads we pull on between engagements — some become client programs, some end in a negative result we are glad to have paid for.
Why we start here
A driven plate is the cheapest honest demonstration in physics. Sand walks away from the antinodes and settles on the nodes, and the plate draws its own eigenmodes without being asked. Nothing is hidden and nothing is simulated.
Every problem we take on is some version of the same picture: a bounded region, a drive, and a set of modes the boundary permits. The interesting engineering is almost always in the boundary.
Research threads
Standing-wave geometry
Boundary conditions as a design variable: change the plate, change what the wave is permitted to do.
Coil loss decomposition
Separating copper, proximity, and core contributions well enough to act on them individually.
Caustic concentration in solids
Energy concentration at fold lines, moved from optics into copper and steel.
Instrumentation
Nothing leaves the bench unmeasured.
- Oscilloscopes
- Wideband capture with calibrated probe chains
- Current sensing
- Clamp and shunt paths, verified against each other
- Impedance
- Sweep characterisation across the operating band
- Fabrication
- In-house winding, printing, and fixture machining
- Thermal
- Contact and imaging survey under sustained duty
- Environmental
- Duty-cycle soak with continuous logging
Notes & talks
| Year | Kind | Title | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Note | Nodal geometry as a design constraint | Internal note |
| 2025 | Note | Loss accounting for high-duty coil sets | Internal note |
| 2025 | Talk | Measuring what the model omits | Austin, TX |
| 2024 | Note | Probe chain calibration for fast transients | Internal note |