At 05:19 PM 10/29/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
It may be that some cold fusion reactions produce heat but no neutrons. I doubt the opposite can occur: neutrons but no heat. It may be that the heat is so low it cannot be detected, but I expect the neutrons would also be very hard to detect in that case.
I think it's quite likely that low levels of neutrons are correlated. The triple-track events are quite rare, but proton recoil, just as diagnostic of neutrons, are at significantly higher levels, so there really are more neutrons than we realized.
I really don't know which is easier to detect, once one is looking intensely for both of them. It's one of the questions I might be able to answer, but heat, I'm sure, would be detectable at levels far below what I'll be able to detect.
There is, however, no problem with detecting heat and neutrons at the same time. SSNTD detectors can be incorporated into any experiment contained in a calorimeter. To avoid problems with the CR-39, it might be necessary to protect it with some covering, but that's a detail, it can be right in with the cathode, and the covering might be a very thin coating of something. They should have no effect on the heat.
The you run many cells, running them the same or with variations, and then look at track counts vs. excess heat. I bet that after background is subtracted, it's a straight line.
Hay, somebody, prove me wrong!
All of the neutron detectors I am familiar with such as scintillation counters detect a small fraction of the total neutron flux. As far as I know, CR-39 also misses a lot of them. This is quite different from charged particle detectors.
No, that *is* a charged particle detector. Neutrons are missed by any detector because they may fail to interact. But there are materials that preferentially interact with them, particularly to slow them down, and when they are slow, they start to do lots of things. That's what my Boron-10 is about, it's a thermal neutron converter, sucks them up and spits out alpha particles, which then do, in fact, produce tracks, 100% (until they are too slow).
