Anaconda
Apparently, you have not understood a word of what I wrote in my lengthy answer. And apparently you cannot read, and similar to
Sol88 you put words in the mouths of other people (in this case
Reality Check) to hide your misunderstanding of what is written. But anywhoooooooooooooooo
tusenfem stated: "Whatever do you mean with "dynamo of electromagnetism"? A double layer is just a small scale (several 10s of deBye lengths) charge separation in a plasma, either driven by the presence of a current or by a boundary of two plasmas with different properties. There is absolutely NO dynamo there, but maybe you understand the word dynamo different from its usual definition."
That's in the laboratory, but electromagnetism is known to be scalable up to 14 orders of magnitude if not up to 20 orders of magnitude or beyond. No limit on scalability has been encountered, yet for electromagnetism.
If that is true, then tusenfem, your discussion has some validity in the laboratory, but again, I ask you, tusenfem, what is the limit on the size and power of double layers?
(First, you can use the "quote" button in every message, then you don't have to write "tusenfem wrote", and which makes it clearer what the quoted text is and what you wrote).
Plasma scaling, yeah I know, Alfvén has written about it, but would you please tell me how you would like to scale my laboratory double layers (well I also discussed them on the sun, so not really laboratory) to the universe? Observations in the Earth's magnetosphere have shown that double layers in nature are
indeed several tens of deBye lengths. Unfortunately, I cannot find the reference at the moment, but plasma physics calculations on double layers, trying to find out the size, have shown that this is a good estimate. That is all based on the way that DLs can be create (instabilities and such) which all lead to a scaling with the deBye length. And yes, you can "scale up" the deBye length, because that is dependent on density, temperature, plasma composition.
But I asked you, what do you mean with the "power" of a DL? Do you mean how much it will accelerate an electron or ion? The gamut of DL electric field strengths runs from very weak (less then the thermal energy of the plasma particles) to relativistic (meaning that electrons can be accelerated over 0.5 MeV). The question is moot, because it all depends on what the situation is. Double layers are effects in a plasma, not causes. An example:
Current in the Earth's magnetosphere, field aligned. The current flows from the relative dense plasmasheet in the tail to the high latitude regions which have much less density. Now, at a certain point the density will become too small to maintain j = n q v, and thus, as current must be divergenceless in this region, the only possibility is to increase v. This is done by the creation of an electric field, maintained by a DL.
So, cause and effect. DLs are created by instabilities or discontinuities.
tusenfem states: "Whatever do you mean with "dynamo of electromagnetism"?
Double layers accelerate both electrons and ions.
Acceleration, constant force equalls acceleration, is the key to dynamic electromagnetic processes.
So, you do not mean dynamo, you mean that the accelerated particles exiting a DL can again create instabilities (see my "solar flare" paper, did you download it?) and thus drive some dynamic processes. NOTE
dynamo ≠ dynamic.
And then, as an
important aside, most of the electric fields that accelerate particles are
inductive electric fields, created by moving magnetic fields. Double layers are not inductive electric fields and they are few and far between.
And also non-constant forces accelerate particles and can be important for processes. E.g. electron acceleration through solitary kinetic Alfvén waves, where in the end the wave is gone and the particles are energized.
