At 10:27 AM 10/9/2009, you wrote:
Very interesting ideas Horace and Robin. I have often wondered if conservation of momentum could play a role in requiring particle emission as part of the hot fusion process. A fused He4 nucleus could contain too much angular momentum to remain stable without particle emission. Other fusion processes might produce more He4 if the mechanism did not involve such large ammounts of kinetic energy.
I think the problem is that the branching ratio remains roughly the same even as the energy of bombarding deuterons is reduced well below straight fusion energy. If the concept were correct, we'd expect higher He-4 branching with lower energies. Remember, if an energetic deuteron penetrates the Coulomb barrier, it has lost the energy the barrier represents, which has been transferred to the nucleus/deuteron combination, so the point at which fusion begins is with zero excess energy, and only the released binding energy is there to destabilize the nucleus. How that energy is distributed in the nucleus, my guess, results in the branching ratio, and it may have much more to do with the effective distribution of nucleons inside the nucleus, which would be roughly random with respect to the impinging deuteron, plus there is the deuteron rotation at the time of fusion, and this may be a probability distribution that has little to do with the excess energy of the deuteron at fusion.
I'm aware that seat-of-the-pants intuition with processes at this level can be way off due to the deficiencies of our ordinary physical experience. While CF theory does interest me, or I wouldn't comment, I'm much more interested in what can be seen experimentally. Given how much evidence there is for the reality of LENR, I'm not looking for "proof" but rather for "demonstration." Reliability of demonstration, however, can then lead to better evidence about the actual mechanisms and conditions involved.
However, there is one interesting possibility: suppose that, when a cell has been tested and radiation detected, or not detected, the cathode is removed and placed in a sealed container and mailed to a lab for helium analysis; at the lab, the cathode would be dissolved, presumably releasing trapped helium. How would the helium correlate with the radiation detected and other observed phenomena? This is the kind of work that would be most effective if many experimenters participate. This is also something that a nonprofit organization might do well: arrange for and help with the analytical costs, providing experimenters using the service satisfy certain requirements. Simultaneously, analysis for transmuted elements might be performed.
