I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement,
"Resonance is very much a part of brute force physics." I think I need to explain resonance to you. Resonance is an interesting phenomenon where SMALL INputs of force or energy into a system results in VERY LARGE OUTputs. There is nothing resonant about using EXTREMELY powerful magnets cooled with liquid helium to accelerate atomic particles to EXTREMELY hi velocities and smashing them head-on into each other. The amount of energy INTO the system is EXTREME and the energy out is paltry. The situation there is opposite the definition of resonance. It's more akin to breaking a wine glass with a 12,000 lb wrecking ball, which is not resonance. This is an odd instance of how my 'intuition' leads me to what I seek/need. After reading your reply, I did some paying work, and then began doing some web browsing and reading other Vortex postings, and after ~30 mins, I ended up at the CMNS website; have no idea why I ended up there. In the first document I opened up, which was the latest online issue of their journal, I came across the following article by Hagelstein, which I think is most relevant to the issue of resonant atomic/nuclear processes. Note his comment, "When we augment the spin-boson model with loss, we see that the coherent energy exchange process improves dramatically [10]. In perturbation theory we see that this comes about through the removal of destructive interference," Coherent Energy Exchange in the Strong Coupling Limit of the Lossy Spin-Boson Model http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/publications.htm The following lengthy excerpt is from Vol. 5, ------------------- "Hence, experiment suggests that the energy is probably nuclear in origin, and that perhaps deuterons are somehow reacting to make 4He. The big problem with such a statement is that there are no previous examples in nuclear physics of nuclear reactions making energy without commensurate energetic particles [7]. So, whatever process that is responsible for the effect is one that hasn't been seen before. There are no previous relevant models in the nuclear physics or condensed matter physics literature, and most scientists believe the literature that does exist rules out any possibility of such an effect. This situation would change radically if there were a known mechanism which could take a large nuclear scale MeV quantum and convert it efficiently into a large number of optical phonons. Such a scenario would be consistent with recent two-laser experiments [8,9], where two weak lasers incident on the cathode surface initiate an excess heat event when the beat frequency is matched to zero-group velocity point of the optical phonons, and the excess heat persists after the lasers are turned off. The excess heat effect initiated with a single laser does not persist. The picture which has been proposed to account for this is one in which the two lasers provide an initial excitation of the optical phonon modes which the new process requires; then, when the lasers are turned off, the new process channels energy into the same modes which sustains the effect. To make progress given such a picture, we need to understand the conditions under which a large nuclear energy quantum can be converted into a large number of optical phonons. Once again, there is no precedent for this; however, it does seem to be what is going on in these experiments, and this motivates us to explore theoretical models which exhibit such an effect. Coherent energy exchange as a physical effect under conditions where a large quantum is divided into many smaller quantum is known in NMR and in atomic physics; it is predicted in the spin-boson model. However, the effect in the spin-boson model is weak, and we need a much stronger version of it to make progress with the excess heat effect in the Fleischmann-Pons effect. When we augment the spin-boson model with loss, we see that the coherent energy exchange process improves dramatically [10]. In perturbation theory we see that this comes about through the removal of destructive interference, which drastically hinders the effect in the basic spin-boson model. In a set of recent papers [10-13], we have been discussing the model, and building up tools and results to try to understand coherent energy exchange when the coupling is stronger and when more quanta are exchanged. In the preceding paper [13], we introduced the local approximation for the lossy spin-boson model, which provides us with a powerful tool with which to address the strong coupling regime. In this work, we continue the analysis by first introducing a numerical algorithm which allows us to obtain eigen- functions, self-energies, and indirect coupling matrix elements in the strong coupling regime. As will be discussed, once we began assembling the results from systematic calculations we noticed that the system appeared to obey scaling laws in the strong coupling regime. This is interesting because after establishing the scaling laws, we can use them to predict the dynamics of the model under conditions of extremely strong coupling, which is where we need to go in order to convert a nuclear-scale quantum into a very large number of atomic scale quanta. Our primary goal then in what follows in this paper is to discuss the scaling laws for self-energy and for the indirect coupling matrix element in the strong coupling regime." ------------------- Why not use your brain to help Hagelstein and others, who are at least open-minded enough to try thinking out of the box, to come up with a plausible hypothesis to explain the 'current-theory-says-its-impossible' evidence. -Mark
