For comparative purposes, if you accelerated a deuteron to a few million volts into a target of lithium deuteride, it would get up to a fair fraction of c. at the end -- and you would get lots of thermonuclear reactions and spallation but few of the reactions would be D + D --> 4He (with the large expected gain ~24 MeV).
In contrast, should a hybrid tunneling reaction be possible; then if you accelerated a nanoparticle of cryogenic deuterium (in a Pd matrix) to a hundredth of that ending velocity, but the particle itself was 10,000 times more massive, you would expect almost zero thermonuclear reactions. However, if the BEC state was maintained till impact with any solid taget -- and there was substantial QM tunneling triggered by impact, then you might conceivably see both the large gain and a decent statistical yield. [this is unknown territory and cannot even be predicted, most likely] Lets see - at an ending velocity of 1000 km/sec and the particle itself is of a geometry below the Forster radius of 10 nm, then the trasition time on impact from the BEC state to a very energetic intermediate quark-soup phase ... well it is way sub-picosecond and that should make it all interesting, no? Basically the net or 'virtual' effect of having a fuel which already in a BEC state, is that the two reactants can be said to already occupy the same space before impact, which converts any relatively slow speed to "virtual-C" so long as the speed itself is sufficient to keep the particle from preheating as it gets close. ... or not? ----- Original Message ---- I am trying to find or imagine a possible QM regime for fusion, which is NOT thermonulcear per se, but employs the acceleration of the fuel particle for two reasons which are impossible to achieve in a normal LENR cell at cryogenic temperatures - where the energy of adjacent reactions quenches the active zone. Pressumably an accelerated fuel - which is in its own reference 'frame' can remain cold untill the instant it is reacted. The temperature of the target would not be relevant - if the speed of the particle was sufficient -- and this would also lower the transition time from a BEC state to a very hot state. (at the same time requiring far less energy input for the acceleration than would be required to achieve a true thermonulcear state). IOW this (thought experiment) is to be a kind of a *hybrid* between hot and cold fusion -- i.e. between QM tunneling andthermonulcear fusion -- which would hopefully happen at greatly umproved statistical rates. Not sure it is even possible to accelerate a cold particle and keep it cold - as a very hard vacuum in the linear accelerator would be difficult to achieve with a constant input of particles and any stray atom would kill the cryogenic state of many particles. If a very hard vacuum could be maintained, another option might be both a ferromagnetic polarity combined with an excitonic charge in the fuel nanoparticle. Having a buckball core seems to facilitate this excitonic state, as the 'space' in the C-60 sphere acts like an electron hole, and perhaps does manage to coheren a positron from the Dirac epo field. The Frenkel electron of a bucky-exiton has typical binding energy on the order of 1.0 eV and this limits the gradient of the accelerating field (unless it is a repulsive electric field) but might allow acceleration without local heating? Jones
