Thanks, Jeff, for the links. Some interesting details that fill in some of the gaps for someone coming up to speed on this story:
Jenkins, Fischbach and others suggest that there is a relationship between the sun and the decay rates of some isotopes. There are any number of decay modes, and the ones that seem to be of interest to the authors are beta (+/-) decays, as far as I can tell. Two ways that they suggest a connection between the sun and the (beta) decay rates of isotopes are the changing distance between the sun and the earth and the activity of solar flares. The heart of their claim is that the decay rates vary with certain solar events, and they do not insist on a mechanism. They do, however, suggest one -- solar neutrinos. The connection between solar neutrinos and beta decay isn't obvious. From Wikipedia, I gather that important sources of solar neutrinos are the PP II, PP III, PP IV and PEP branches of the proton-proton chain. I've also read that the generation of pions and kaons from high-energy proton-proton collisions is a source. Kaons yield pions when they decay, and pions yield neutrinos when they decay. This is what Fischbach and Jenkins say about neutrinos (quoted from [1], in 2010): We agree that, according to current theory of the standard weak interaction, neutrinos should not be influencing decay rates. We also agree that Super-Kamiokande data are not anomalous. Our position is that either neutrinos have properties we do not yet understand, or some other particle or field behaving like neutrinos is influencing decay rates. In slightly more detail, we are not considering neutrino capture as in the case of Super-K. Rather we work in a picture where neutrinos pass through the sample of decaying nuclei, as they pass through everything else, and exchange an energy on the order of 10-100 eV. Given the sensitivity of beta decays and electron capture to the energy available, the exchange of a small amount of energy in this way could be sufficient to explain the observed effects. So one possible mechanism is a small transfer of energy from the neutrinos to the local environment that increases the probability of the weak interaction. There are important questions about their thesis, some of which are mentioned in the criticism that Jeff links to, which suggests measurement artifact. The authors seek to rule out measurement artifact and present some interesting graphs. One graph shows an unmistakable annual period in the decay of 36Cl [2] (although the source of the variation may be the effects of annual changes in temperature and pressure on instruments, for example). Another graph suggests that there is some connection between solar flares and the decay of 54Mn [3]. A weird thing about the second graph is that there are some solar flares that did not correlate with the decay of 54Mn, something the authors are aware of. An important point to note is that they suggest that the effect on decays differs for different isotopes. Note also that there is a paper that suggests a daily variation in LENR transmutation experiments [4], which makes reference to Jenkins's and Fischbach's work towards the end. Eric [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/26/scientist-smackdown-are-solar-neutrinos-messing-with-matter/ [2] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.5783v1.pdf [3] http://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.3156v1.pdf, towards the end of the paper. [4] Scholkmann, Mizuno and Nagel, http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol8.pdf, p. 37 ff. On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Jeff Berkowitz <pdx...@gmail.com> wrote: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5783 > http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3318 > http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4074 > http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3156 > > Analysis: > http://phys.org/news201795438.html > > > Refutation: > http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4357 >
