Jed, can I make a request? Acknowledging your fluency in Japanese and relationship with Mizuno ...
In Mizuno's paper, he describes the deposition the preparation of the Ni and the Pd with a good deal of text, but in the final part of the preparation (page 8, figure 10) he describes heating the ceramic heater wrapped in Pd wire to 700-800°C for 10-20 hours to deposit Pd on the Ni surface. This may be the most important part of the process, yet he only spent 1 small paragraph describing the deposition. The melting point of Pd is 1550°C and the boiling point of Pd is 2960°C. Clearly, at the specified temperature of the ceramic heater, the vapor pressure of the Pd is very, very low. So, without plasma, it is hard to understand how any Pd is deposited at all. Mizuno only describes D2 as being in the chamber - there is no Ar that is normally used in sputtering (energetic Ar ions are used in sputtering to have a better probability of knocking off atoms of the metal due to the high mass of Ar). Mizuno doesn't describe a DC plasma condition that would have been used for striking a glow near the ceramic heater with Pd wire for deposition. *Can you ask Mizuno if he can provide an explanation of the mechanism of Pd deposition used in conjunction with the ceramic heater wound with the Pd wire? Was it an evaporation process, sputtering, or ion plating technique? Was a plasma active during the Pd deposition? Was it a deuterium plasma? Was there a DC voltage applied between the heated Pd wire and the cathode?* Also, Mizuno shows SEM photos of the Ni mesh cathode surface before and after the treatment. The after photo shows micron scale bulbous growth that I surmise from his deposition method cannot be all Pd. It appears that the surface morphology of the Ni has been vastly altered, and probably has only a small film thickness of Pd on top of that. His Ni mesh cathode has a lot of area, and he only has a small amount of Pd wire on the ceramic heater. *Can you ask Mizuno what he believes is the thickness of Pd that he has deposited by his final deposition process? I.E. in Figure 32, how thick is the Pd film on top of the Ni? * Regards - Bob Higgins
