The possibility that a "bare proton" created in our 3-space is somehow able to attract virtual particles in quanta of 3.4 eV (and multiples) directly from Dirac's sea, resulting in excess energy, is fascinating.
It could help to explain what is going on with some of many reported excess-energy phenomena involving bare protons, especially Langmuir's torch and the recent MAHG of Nicholas Moller. http://jlnlabs.imars.com/mahg/ In October in the J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 16 7017-7023 (2004) Experimental observation of an atomic hydrogen material with H�H bond distance of 150 pm "suggesting metallic hydrogen" (according to them) was reported by Badiei and Holmlid of G�teborg University, Sweden. This may or may not be further evidence of the main point of this post, but should be mentioned in case the authors mis-interpreted their own work. Abstract - with (alternative) commentary. A phase of hydrogen called Rydberg matter (RM) is formed in ultra-high vacuum by desorption of hydrogen from an alkali. The RM atoms are released with a surprising amount of energy - 9.4 eV, which is over double the IP (ionization potential) of the alkali in which had been immobilized, and after deducting the energy of the laser photons which released them there appears to be a net gain of around 3.4 eV per atom. The authors of this experiment, OTOH, went into it looking for evidence of metallic H, and consequently they believe from the results that this energy is evidence of the bond energy of a metallic phase of atomic hydrogen, using the results by Chau et al (2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 245501) They could be correct, but this result also can be reinterpreted to fall in-line with some recent suggestions about possible excess energy methodology in Langmuir's torch, and in the Moller Atomic Hydrogen Generator, which is based on years of careful investigation by Moller into the details of Langmuir's torch, even going so far as to dig-up Langmuir's typewritten correspondence with Bohr from the archives in Denmark. This torch was a big-deal back then, way ahead of its time. Much of the reported excess energy related "bare protons" (or for that matter, "bare deuterons" in the interfacial layer of a CF electrode) could be related to the simple presence of the proton charge being able to attract an opposite charge from Dirac's sea of negative energy, specifically from "virtual positronium". The virtual Ps has a liftime which is fleeting in our 3-space and does not have time to annihilate, BUT before fading into the reciprocal space which is Dirac's sea, it does have time enough to become disrupted and to leave behind half or all of its binding energy of 6.8 eV, which is likely to be in the form of light-lepton pairs of net mass/energy of 6.8 eV. or 3.4V each, in my view. Anytime one sees "peaks" in the spectroscopy of hydrogen plasmas at these two levels, particularly the lower one, this could possibly be indicative of an energy "extraction" from Dirac's sea, at least in this hypothesis. Unfortunately, this explanation is also effectively indistinguishable from saying that the energy comes from "ZPE" except that here it is quantized, so it can be traced to a source. Jones
