Axil Axil wrote: > The palladium coating must serve only to provide a better surface plasmon > performance profile than does nickel. Not exactly the "only" purpose but certainly the Mizuno breakthrough does appear to have a plasmon methodology for thermal gain using dense deuterium. Palladium is the co-catalyst for densification. This is the part Mills perhaps got right - you need many catalysts to maximized shrinkage and nickel alone will not do it alone.
Palladium has narrow optical properties; but primarily, it is the primo spillover catalyst, which would be responsible - acting in sequence with nickel to provide 6-7 different Rydberg levels for forming dense deuterium from D2 gas. Perhaps it is a cascade - all the way down to the Dirac level. A plasmon methodology would also explain why "Type A" Pd alloy is or should be used. As I recall, the silver content is surprisingly high in Type A - something like 25% of the alloy. Silver is extraordinarily photoactive (which is why compounds of silver were used in photography in the days before digital). In a plasmon only context - silver makes more sense than palladium. BTW if plasmons are the operative mechanism then much better results will be had by dispensing with the heater coil and finding the proper LEDs to radiate only the exact frequency which is needed (through a window)... which would mean the red photons at ~590 nm in most cases. As it is now - heat from resistance wire does have a strong red line but also 90% of the energy is in frequencies not needed for plasmons - and wasted. Mizuno could bump the COP way up with photon irradiation at the plasmon frequency. It all fits together... on paper :-)
