I wonder if electron based quasiparticles can be involved or even causative in the cold fusion mechanism.
In physics, fractionalization is the phenomenon whereby the quasiparticles of a system cannot be constructed as combinations of its elementary constituents. One of the earliest and most prominent examples is the fractional quantum Hall effect, where the constituent particles are electrons but the quasiparticles carry fractions of the electron charge. Fractionalization can be understood as deconfinement of quasiparticles that together are viewed as comprising the elementary constituents. In the case of spin–charge separation, for example, the electron can be viewed as a bound state of a 'spinon’ and a 'chargon', which under certain conditions can become free to move separately. The Mills cold fusion mechanism shows indications of fractionalization of the orbiton/holon, the orbital quasiparticle component of the electrons quantum properties. This fractionalization may be indicative of spin change separation as important and active in the cold fusion mechanism. Spin–charge separation is one of the most unusual manifestations of the concept of quasiparticles. This property is counterintuitive, because neither the spinon, with zero charge and spin half, or the chargon, with charge minus one and zero spin, can be constructed as combinations of the electrons, holes, phonons and photons that are the constituents of the system. It is an example of fractionalization, the phenomenon in which the quantum numbers of the quasiparticles are not multiples of those of the elementary particles, but fractions. Since the original electrons in the system are fermions, one of the spinon and chargon has to be a fermion, and the other one has to be a boson. One is theoretically free to make the assignment in either way, and no observable quantity can depend on this choice. The formalism with bosonic chargon and fermionic spinion is usually referred to as the "slave–fermion" formalism. If chargon is a boson, it could support a condensate that enables a charge accumulation mechanism whereby the large negative electric charge localized is a small volume can remove the coulomb barrier to allow fusion to occur. Mileys observations of superconductive behavior of pockets of hydrogen ions may also be other indications of some sort of quasiparticle fractionalization at work. On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 5:58 PM, Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/splitting_the_electron/ > > Swiss, German physicists split the electron > > Spin here, orbit there > By Richard Chirgwin > > 19th April 2012 00:01 GMT > > An international research team has observed an electron being split > into two “quasi particles”, one carrying the original particle’s spin, > the other carrying its orbital movement. > > Spin (giving rise to magnetism) and angular momentum (the path the > electron follows around the nucleus of an atom) are two out of the > electron’s three quantum properties (the other is charge). These > properties attach to a single electron – unless, it seems, you pump > the right substance with the right amount of energy. > > <more> > >
