Nevermind that one aspect of the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect has been
declared nonexistent by some Hungarians:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996PhRvC..53..880B
Doolittles everywhere know there are no 'ruder pests' than those who
would crush cherished allusions ... and apologies in advance for
another long and rambling post. Adjust your SPAM filters accordingly.
About once every 6 months I get this same recurring vision of future
"free-energy": a simple neutron generator based on RF irradiation of
deuterium oxide in a magnetic field -- IOW the simplicity of NMR
(nuclear magnetic resonance) using a PM (permanent magnet) tubular
reactor. This could be miniaturized to a small size. The deuterium could
also be absorbed into a ferromagnetic matrix - like nickel.
But like Eliza, 'Doinglittle' to make this concept happen is a
consequence of many situational difficulties.
This idea resembles an older proposal by Dennis Letts and probably
others, and has reportedly been tried in a rudimentary fashion, showing
nothing. Hope springs eternal however - and instead of the idea going
cold, perhaps it should go cryogenic, and tried once more.
Neutrons - produced 'on demand' are arguably the most valuable commodity
on earth. Avogadro's number of them will weigh about a gram, and a
kilogram equivalent could be worth a cool $100,000,000, in terms of the
value of the isotopes which can be bred from them, or the energy which
they can create when they interact with boron, for instance.
Why cold? Many strong ductile materials, steels for instance, become
frangible when subject to extreme cold, but that has nothing to do with
the atomic nucleus - except by analogy. Does an elongated nucleus become
less stable when the spin of its electron is "locked" by a combination
of a strong magnetic field and low temperature ?
This type of nucleus would certainly seem to lose an axis of free
movement - which often provides suprises. Although heavy water freezes
easily it can be taken down near absolute zero, at which point the atoms
may not move much, but the nucleus can still be active. It is also a
molecular boson, if that makes any difference.
What brought this to mind again was the recent thread on Strange
Properties of Water, and Chaplin's phase chart - and Ice-X.
[Side Note]: "Recruits" in that thread was a vague reference to a
strange and confused movie with a borrowed Cat's Cradle subtheme,
applied to a computer virus which freezes the world's computers, kinda
like the Y2K hoopla.
Anyway, moving on - there is a real Ice X. It has full packing symmetry
and has the most remarkable feature of being over 2.5 times more dense
than water. Presumably the heavy water version would be almost 2.8 times
denser.
Now consider (keeping in mind that this speculation is closer to SciFi
than HiFiSci) what could happen if the "molecular bosons" acted like a
simple atomic BEC...?... and of course, if one started out with super
pure D2O, all of the O being only the 16 isotope.
If subthermal neutrons are freed at a microgram per minute rate, which
could create 10-20 kWe, this may not even raise the temperature of the
ice very much, so long as they can get free of the ice tube to interact
elsewhere within the alloted 1000 seconds or so before neutron decay.
At the sub-angstrom level, a nucleus such as deuterium could (possibly)
become *less* stable at lower temperatures in a magnetic field - but
also with a narrow range of overlapping RF (at a resonant frequency to
either the proton or neutron). Obviously if this happened, NMR
techniques, such as are used in Medical diagnotiscs, would show some
anomaly at low temperature as all lifeforms contain some deuterium.
It is an open question as to whether or not anyone has actually
performed NMR on deuterated materials at cryogenic temperatures, close
to absolute zero - and then had the foresight to look for free neutrons.
It would be interesting (and save a lot of time and aggravation) to know
this, but most NMR machines are not equipped to input two different
frequencies at the same time, so it is doubtful to have been done before
by serendipity.
Beginning with what we know or suspect about the D2 nucleus - in a
blown-up mental image: it is a highly elongated nucleus, similar to a
"barbell" of two spheres separated by at least one unit of diameter of
either sphere. One end of that barbell is slightly heavier, so there is
built-in axial instability anyway, and if we now substitute for the bar
(connection between the two spheres) the mental conception of a "spring"
(gluon-spring?) so that there is also a constant oscillation between the
two - then we are getting close to the needed level of imagery.
We want to push the oscillation of the barbell to resonance at the same
time as increase the amplitude of asymmetrical jerk (cross vector). Both
of these two isotopes H and D - have a strong magnetic moment, but a
significantly different moment, and also a very significantly
different NMR resonance. This is a recipe for splitting at low energy.
PLUS - these atoms H and D have the single electron which if "locked" in
one orbit is like a solenoid coil whose effective magnetic field can be
calculated. As felt by the D nucleus - that field is 12.5 Tesla ! This
assumes a perfectly planar electron spin orbital of course, and no one
knows how this would actually look in Ice-X.
At a certain modest level of magnetic field (say the field provided by a
permanent magnet) then the nuclear components of ice with a moment, will
tend to mutually align but not quite. When one end of the barbell is
stimulated at its resonant RF and the other fells its different resonant
frequency- will the "bar" - i.e. the gluon spring, as it were - ever be
extended further (either axially or in another vector) than the short
reach of the strong force (which BTW is not much further afield, in this
nucleus than the furthest extremity of its normal elongation) ?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Jones
