On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:50 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: A fast particle doesn't need a matching energy band to lose energy. It > loses a > portion of what it has simply by ionizing other atoms.
I gather that Ron is envisioning some kind of fermi liquid of deuterons, with a band gap that is somehow set up that imposes a barrier to the deuterons on the high energy side of the gap dropping to the lower energy levels. For this reason, they just sort of fly around at the high energy levels until a space opens up. In his description, it's almost like he's turning the deuterons into very high energy electrons and reversing the sign of the charge. I am not sure how this would be possible. In my naive, common sense model of a solid, the electrons form a liquid of sorts and any actors with mass such as deuterons behave more like particles than waves. In Ron's description, the deuterons seem to behave more like waves than particles. It seems like unless the entire local region of the metal, in which deuterons can move around freely, were filled to the brim with them, a band gap in which additional deuterons are temporarily forced into a high energy level would be hard to set up, even if it were conceivably possible, since otherwise those deuterons would just migrate and spill out into low pressure regions. Also, it's not clear what would create a gap. Eric
