Thanks, Ron, for providing this link. I'm pretty excited. Here's the abstract from Science:
Tunneling of electrons through a potential barrier is fundamental to chemical reactions, electronic transport in semiconductors and superconductors, magnetism, and devices such as THz-oscillators. While typically controlled by electric fields, a completely different approach is to bind electrons into bosonic quasiparticles with a photonic component. Quasiparticles made of such light-matter microcavity polaritons have recently been demonstrated to Bose-condense into superfluids, whereas spatially separated Coulomb-bound electrons and holes possess strong dipole interactions. Using tunneling polaritons, we connect these two realms, producing bosonic quasiparticles with static dipole moments. Our resulting three-state system yields dark polaritons analogous to those in atomic systems or optical waveguides offering new possibilities for electromagnetically induced transparency, room-temperature condensation, and adiabatic photonic to electronic transfer. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/04/05/science.1219010.abstract Some interesting points: the new particle is a boson rather than a fermion, and there is the possibility of adiabatic photonic to electronic transfer (for those, like me, who find the language unfamiliar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process). My initial guess is that free electrons in the "electron soup" that were disassociated from H2 when it entered the metal lattice are combining by way of an intermediate process with the free protons that were split off. You need a flux of hydrogen in order to make free electrons and protons available for the intermediate process. Regarding inverse beta decay, also called electron capture, Wikipedia says, "note that a free proton cannot normally be changed to a free neutron by this process: The proton and neutron must be part of a larger nucleus." So the hypothesis being developed here would appear to be at variance with that statement. My apologies for the slurry of newbie physics emails. Anyone who knows this stuff at a much deeper level is very welcome to comment on anything that would be manifestly impossible (not just unlikely) about any of these points. Some questions I have: in electron capture, a neutrino or a positron is involved; also, there's an X-ray and sometimes a gamma ray -- how would any of these details need to be modified by the scheme being proposed here? And what about the quantum numbers makes it difficult for an electron to combine with a proton in the first place? Does it have to do with their spin? Eric On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Ron Wormus <prot...@frii.com> wrote: > <http://www.sciencedaily.com/**releases/2012/04/120405142156.**htm<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120405142156.htm> > > > > According to team leader, Professor Jeremy Baumberg, "the trick to telling > electrons how to pass through walls, is to now marry them with light." > This marriage is fated because the light is in the form of cavity photons, > packets of light trapped to bounce back and forth between mirrors which > sandwich the electrons oscillating through their wall. > > Ron > >
