On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote:
We found that when several materials are subjected to conditions expected > and found to produce voids, and then exposed to H2, a source of radiation > results that is consistent with the radiation reported by previous workers. > In addition, this radiation has strange effects on other materials, which > is a new discovery. > In the paper, Storms and Scanlan describe the Geiger-Muller activity of unknown species that appear to have half-lives of 58 and 109 minutes, respectively; they wonder whether they're actually the same species, observed under different conditions. Wikipedia has a listing of radioisotopes by half-life [1], but it is incomplete. The only two radioisotopes mentioned there within range are nobelium-259 (58 minutes) and fluorine-18 (1.8 hours). Is there a more complete listing somewhere? Also, I wonder whether the gamma energies are narrow or broad. It would be nice to have another detector whose activity could be correlated with that of the GM counters which could give an indication of the energy levels. Storms and Scanlan refer to a possible speeding up of the decay of potassium-40. Potassium-40 normally decays via three channels -- β+, β- and electron capture -- and has a half-life of 1.248E9 years [2]. Their line of reasoning would seem to imply an acceleration of the weak interaction and the difficulties that go along with that -- am I mistaken here? Is the gamma thought to be an electron-positron annihilation photon? Like David says, it would be nice to see some calibration runs against known radiation sources. Also it would be nice to run an active and an inactive assembly in parallel, to address questions about background noise messing up the signal. Eric [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_isotopes_by_half-life#103_seconds [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_potassium
