Hi, I just read a 1993 paper by Eiichi Yamaguchi and Takashi Nishioka [1]. In that paper they believe they saw HT gas emerge from palladium thin foils which had been exposed to D2. This is a conclusion about tritium -- they believe there was something that generated tritium in their experiment. I am interested to know whether their conclusion is well-founded in this specific instance using the reasoning they use (not in all cases of experiments like the one they did).
They seem to conclude that HT was in the outgas on the basis of mass spectrometer graphs such as these ones [2]. They used a high-resolution mass spectrometer that could differentiate between species nominally of 4 amu such as 4He (4.00260 amu), HT (4.02388 amu), D2 (4.02820 amu) and DH2 (4.02975 amu), because their spectrometer had a precision down to 0.001 amu at 4 amu. In the case of the image above, the label for HT, circled, has a dotted line going down one side of a peak, and the label for D2, next to it, has a dotted line at another side of the peak. The conclusion seems to rest on the peak being broad enough to cross over the HT line. It seems to me that their conclusion about HT in the outgas is perhaps mistaken. The reason it seems to be mistaken is that in calibration runs with D2 and 4He gas when no samples were in the chamber, the graphs look nearly the same [3]. By the logic they use later on for the live runs, I think we would conclude there was a lot of HT in the calibration runs, but I doubt that this was the case. It appears instead that there is some blurriness in the resolution of the peaks, and that what they saw was probably D2 instead of HT. Perhaps someone who knows about measurements like these can clarify whether their conclusion about HT evolution is sound? Eric [1] http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IkegamiHthirdinter.pdf, starting on p. 179. [2] http://i.imgur.com/z5DdYQU.jpg [3] http://i.imgur.com/gGOQw2F.jpg
