... Long before P&F, when Aspden ... was talking about bound dual virtual muons. This citation will be hard to find: H. Aspden: "Physics without Einstein" (Sabberton, Southampton, 1969)
IN order not to leave a "loose end" in this thread - and for completing a minimal "virtual muon" hypothesis for cold fusion, a brief googling shows that there is a more to this subject than idle speculation. Not much more, but more. Luis Alvarez was the first reported observer of muon-catalyzed fusion, and despite deuterium being present along with hydrogen in the gaseous medium, the reaction was NOT d-d fusion. Asking oneself: "why not?" could be instructive. IOW that overlooked factoid could be significant. What Alvarez witnessed was p-d fusion, proton and deuteron, when analyzing the outcome of experiments with muons incident on a hydrogen bubble chamber at Berkeley in 1956. No helium-4 was seen. The fusion reaction with muon catalysis, as it turns out, results preferentially in helium-3 (then called a 'helion' which would make a nice name for a new version of this concept), and 5.5 MeV of energy, mostly in the form of a gamma. Is this branch somehow "selective" or "receptive" for muon catalyzation (as opposed to merely a higher cross section)? Certainly Alvarez never suggested that - nor has anyone else as far as I know. It could be coincidental ... or not. As we know, fusion reactions where there is but a single massive particle as ash - are far rarer (lower cross section) than are reactions where two massive particle which can carry away excess energy. There are good reasons for this, and its partly why the TSC came into existence = i.e. the rationale is that if you have two massive particles then you do not need to account for the absence of high energy gammas (at least not the primary gamma) which would be expected. AND are easy to document. This failing: the lack of a high energy gamma is always the insurmountable reason that experts in fusion doubt the D + D -> He-4 scenario - despite the Haglestein kludge of a phonon cascade. IOW why invent one unproveable explanation for a reaction which may not exist? Don't get me wrong - the helium is there, in LENR without any doubt - but it cannot come from d+d fusion, according to mainstream physics. The TSC may or may not help your understanding in that regard, but there is an implication of the Alvarez finding which should be mentioned - in the case of another hypothetical variety of LENR involving tetrahedral structures in a metal matrix - encapsulating what will occasionally become a virtual muon, or bound muon virtual pair (of the Aspden variety). OK ... whew ... That was a long setup for this paper: "Phase Conjugation Feynman Diagrams" by Douglass A. White http://www.dpedtech.com/FD.pdf .... and particularly the Feynman diagram of virtual muon formation on page 7. What this diagram may indicate to some observers, if you want to frame LENR (in part or totally) as muon based, and given that the muon is ubiquitous in nature, due to cosmic rays - but are extraordinarily short-lived so as to seemingly be impossible to harness - However- the implication could be: ... that muons NEVER really fully decay - in the sense of becoming unavailable to a reaction! instead they merely experience "transformational decay" (in the sense of color change ?) from real to virtual - which can be analogized to nature "putting them in the Dirac freezer" for later use. "Just another crutch" ala the Haglestein cascade, you complain ? Probably, but at least it is a new crutch, and you heard it first on Vortex today. Jones Oh, what about falsifiability? Well here is a stab at that. You generally have heard the conclusion stated: that there is a either a big disadvantage, or no proven advantage, to using a balanced mix of deuterium and light hydrogen in any LENR experiment. Or alternatively that helium 3 is seldom seen as ash. That is "common knowledge" but there is no rigorous proof of it as a general rule, and only the slightest of anecdote that it is really true for experiments not involving palladium, and especially could be false with a different matrix metal or alloy, ERGO- instead it could only apply to the common P&F experiments which are optimized for deuterium. Whereas - IF a version of muon catalyzed TSC were to be valid (called it VMC-TSC or virtual muon catalyzed tetrahedral symmetric condensation or simply the helion concept) and IF there is something to the Alvarez helion preferential cross section; then perhaps this can be engineered in advance to proceed favorably that way with a goal of actually AVOIDING helium-4. In which case, one would suspect that a 50:50 mix of D+H could have some increased rate of fusion over alternatives when properly implemented. And moreover the ash would be mostly helium-3. That should make it easy to verify - if it is valid. It would also make the ash very valuable and could push a commercial product into development. Since you want to encourage an arrangement of four molecules in a metal matrix (one on each vertex) the matrix cannot be bulk palladium, unless nano-fractured, since the four molecules, even compressed, would require a larger cavity geometry. This could be figured out by computer modeling. For predictable results, the need for nano-fracturing can best be met otherwise, one must surmise. For instance, you could simply try something like one of the many versions of Raney Ni. There are dozens of types of Raney with the nano-fractures already provide therein, and I suspect that a version with some Pd content would help in this concept. Yes, I know that mixed isotope gases tend rapidly lose any heterogeneous binding or predictability, and might tend to segregate as mixed d2 and h2 but still, statistically-speaking there would be an advantage for a 50:50 mix over say 20:80 or anything else. The best part of this is that the ash is extremely valuable, and is worth more than any excess heat would be worth - and if the process is teamed up with and advanced fuel (i.e. second generation) hot fusion process, then it could be an excellent synergy. Jones
