Sunday mornings may be an better time for belated three-part harmonies, but Sabato will have to do for this one. Three years ago, in checking the archives, Rothwell and Scudder casually mentioned ICCF-11 and a paper mentioning 'harmonic traps' which drew little attention; but recently the Arrata results may indicate that it was ahead of its time. IOW it fits in well.
Kim and Passell are in a choir or sorts, since like many before them, they have speculated that the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) mechanism can be be operate at higher temperature (slightly above ambient) and operate on a near ground-state mixture of positively charged bosons which fuse with higher probability - due perhaps to simple tight confinement. I do not know who to credit as the first to mention a quasi-BEC mechanism for LENR, but am aware that it goes back a long ways. Frank Z may know. Confinement in a Pd matrix may serve to take away freedom of movement on three axes, just as does coldness. It can be considered to be 'virtual cryogenics' in certain situations. No, I don't do windows, nor Hamiltonians, and do not know if confinement is more than a metaphor for coldness, but appreciate that it is a good metahpor. Kim and Passell's contribution at ICCF-11 to this body of theory includes applying the term "harmonic trap" to quasi-BEC based LENR ...and additionally - in looking at mixtures of bosons, instead of all D (i.e. lithium-6). Their theory predicts the (D + Li) reaction rates will be higher by a factor of ~50. This has yet to verified, except possibly in the Arrata data. Here is the Wiki entry for harmonic trap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_in_a_harmonic_trap One of the main predictions of any BEC mechanism is that the Coulomb interaction between charged bosons may be suppressed and hence the conventional Gamow factor may be statistically changed or absent. The Gamow Factor is the probability for overcoming the Coulomb barrier in order to undergo nuclear reaction. The issue of three charged bosons (of the same or even of a mixed identity) but in the same tight geometry (very close confinement in a Pd matrix) is technically not covered by Gamow factor any more than two different bosons would be, but on first blush, this mechanism might seem to be of far lower probability than two body reactions. After all, in a typical plasma, 3-body reactions are millions of times lower in probability (meaning *nothing* really, except demonstrating how easy it is to fool mainstream physicists) Mention the "three-body" problem in any guise- and plasma physicists will roll their eyes. Tunnel vision. Part of this reluctance to look beyond the relative simplicity of paired-interactions, historically, goes back to Euler, his strange math, and three astronomical bodies. The 3-body problem is analytically solvable but requires evaluation of elliptic integrals. IOW it is not easy to pull off without a team of talented grad student programmers, and plenty of supercomputer access, and consequently the mainstream does not usually want to entertain the possibility. An easier way to handle it might be to say that instead of real 3-body reactions, we have two linked 2-body reactions at picosecond intervals. Three deuterons in a matrix vacancy could result in an unusual LENR statistical situation. When the parameters of an actual experiment give excess heat - but which is found with too little helium to account for it, but where lithium appears as a transmutation product, here is a bit of new info to consider .... Helium-6 is unusual. Despite its "top-heaviness" of excess neutrons (3:1 ratio), it has a half-life of almost a second- which is enormous in terms of QM "life expectancy" IOW it has LOTS of time to shed LOTS of energy kinetically (if you believe the Chubb magic phonon hypothesis) prior to beta-decay, and can do this without gammas or neutrons arguably. Alternatively, it can shed UV photons. BTW - this might be a good segue for Chubb to modify his magic-phonon hypothesis to include semicoherent UV photons (13.6 eV) as the predecessor step to the magic phonon ! It would then not have to be quite so magical as before. Why bring 6He into the mix at all, other than its long period of stability? (which BTW is a very good reason, even if the following does not support it).... Well, if you suspect that a deuteron can exist at a deeply redundant ground state for a substantial time period (many nanoseconds) which is a conclusion that I call "Mills-light" since the shrunken deuteron does not need to a stable long-term ... Then in this kind of three-body reaction we have D-Dy-D where the Dy (deuterino) is the particle which ends-up supplying the two excess neutrons in the metastable 6He nucleus which is formed, and provides a nice proven "shedding time" until it decays (which as mentioned, has an incredibly long half-life for such a top-heavy (extra-neuts) metastable atom. The end proof or evidence for this would be a finding of anomalous 6Li. Methinks that a check of the literature will uncover significant past mention of 6Li as an unexpected transmutation product, going back many years. Jones I should have saved the wild-hared [sic] "statistician" joke for this post .... (not that anybody got a chuckle out of it yesterday)