At 12:39 AM 12/11/2009, Mark Iverson wrote:
Horace wrote:
"I don't know why a neutron would not act like a neutron."
Let me take a stab at that one...
Perhaps because it's in a fully D-loaded palladium lattice, where
other things aren't acting like
they 'should'? ;-) Yeah, I know, that wasn't much help...
A "fully loaded palladium lattice" is still only a little more dense
than deuterium metal, though there are possibilities of local
densities much higher than that because of statistical variations
possible because the atoms are more mobile than in a metal. Still, at
any moment in time, most neutrons in this unusual material would
still behave like neutrons anywhere, it is *very* difficult to
conceive of something that would be able to control all that local
behavior so that it was anomalous.
Consider, again, my own broken record: Takahashi's Tetrahedral
Symmetric Condensate theory. In short, the basis of this theory was,
experimentally, that Takahashi discovered and reported in the 1990s
that multibody fusion cross-section was significantly higher in
palladium deuteride than expected. He did the difficult quantum field
theory work and predicted that if four deuterons form a tetrahedron,
confined in a lattice cell, they will fuse to Be-8 within a femtosecond, 100%.
If this is true there really isn't much going on that is that
unusual, just conditions which allow a very rare Bose-Einstein
condensate to form for a flash. NAE would then be a region where,
momentarily, deuterium gas concentration (the likely reason for four
deuterons to be in the right locations: two deuterium molecules) is
enhanced by shifts from equilibrium. The rest follows from that Be-8
fusing and the resulting emissions from the excited nucleus, and then
the fission of this unstable nucleus into two alpha particles.
No new physics, really. Just process conditions that had not been anticipated.
Seen from this perspective, theories that require new kinds of
neutrons that behave differently from other neutrons (why? What's
different about them, once formed? How do they carry this difference
with them, to know to behave differently, so to speak?) see to be
rather tortured.
But until we have strong evidence for a particular theory, we do have
to keep that door pretty wide open. The Be-8 theory does, however,
explain just about everything known about these reactions, AFAIK.
Heat. Helium. Subsurface, not too deep, but not actually on the
surface, insufficient confinement. TSC would be neutrally charged,
because it includes the electrons -- Heffner note! -- and so it could
fuse with Other Stuff, occasionally. Some of the alphas,
statistically, would be hot enough to induce secondary reactions as
well. (Which comes first, the photon emissions or the fission?)
No branching ratio problems, no Mossbauer effect transfer of energy
to the lattice needed. Perhaps we could think of it as
Oppenheimer-Phillips pushed to the edge, with four deuterons, my
classical physics brain likes to think. What's remarkable is the
prediction of 100% fusion if the TSC forms. So ... does it form? What
would be the expected formation rate?
