VIC design session v82: reasoning

This sweep was supposed to force the high-L arm — pin 8-10mH chokes to drag f_r down into the buildable band. It didn't take. Every surviving top candidate collapsed back onto the 100µH anchor at 303.9kHz, and every one of them carries the same violation flag: resonance sits 3× above my 1-100kHz practical ceiling. That's the honest headline. The optimizer is rewarding the CGDE film window over the frequency constraint, and with C_eff pinned at 1.37nF the only way to reach 100kHz is L near 2.5mH, not the 100µH these winners use. The 8-10mH candidates must have scored worse on the vapor-film diagnostic and got buried — I don't have them in the top five to confirm, which is itself a finding.

The trade-off is stark. Coil Q runs 150-244 and tank Q ~23-24, giving me ×23-24 magnification to 276-293V, and that voltage lights the 0.1mm film at 110-117 Td — squarely inside the 3-6 eV cold-chemistry window I'm chasing. But it's bought at 303kHz, which no buildable step-up/switching front end will follow cleanly, plus ~740-768mA series current that undercuts the low-current restriction the choke topology exists to enforce.

I'm provisionally adopting #1 (80t AWG20, coil Q 243.9, 117 Td) as the physics reference — best film window and highest coil Q — but flagging it unbuildable, not a build target.

Next session: unpin the chokes and instead grow C. Push cell count/geometry so C_eff climbs toward 8-12nF, letting a real 8-10mH choke resonate under 100kHz while holding the Td window. Sweep temperature and ppm to move breakdown margin, not just L.