On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:30 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: >In a different connection, an important point that he makes concerns the > >ROI -- he says that a 20 keV deuteron will travel a long distance, perhaps > >on the order of millimeters, through a metal. Assuming he's right, that's > >a lot more than 38 atoms, so I suspect the initial back-of-the-envelope > >calculation for the energy loss was off in at least that respect. > > > > I suspect you have that backwards. The correct assumption is that he's > wrong. >
Ron has been good enough to address points that have been raised in this thread in the response copied below. He suggests some experimental leads that, if verified, will lend credence to his hypothesis. I'm not really in a position to weigh in on the merits of his hypothesis, except to say that if there is even a five percent chance that he's right, it seems like these leads would be worth looking into. Eric "the penetration depth of 20KeV deuterons in a metal is not 30 atoms, it's measured, and it's like microns or a mm (I didn't look it up, but it's the same as alpha particle penetration in order of magnitude), it's just not 30 atoms. The ionization is not as efficient as he imagines. I am tired of repeating this, it is well known experimental fact, no matter how counterintuitive it is that you can have charged particles zipping through matter. This was the original stopping power mystery that motivated Bohr and Bethe. "Regarding the "entering the Pd nucleus to fuse" OF COURSE NOT, the deuterons do not enter the Pd nucleus, they have nowhere near enough energy. They fuse about 100 Fermis away from the Pd nucleus, a K-shell radius away, and then they transfer the energy by virtual photon (electrostatic interaction) to the Pd nucleus. This happens at a distance, it doesn't require contact. Electrostatics is nonlocal. The matrix elements are not small, because the charge on the Pd nucleus is 46, that's a lot of charge. "The details of banding of deuterons, if it happens at all, are difficult to work out, I don't know if they behave more like particles or like waves, and it doesn't really make much difference. That's simply a question of their coherence time, the time to do something to a phonon or an electron. In any case, the deuterons bump around the atoms, focusing near the nuclei, and the first place where you would see fusion is near a nucleus, at a range where you could potentially transfer energy to the nucleus. This doesn't require massive conspiracy, or some weird violation of physical law. All you need is a concentration of deuterons high enough to lead to fusion, as this fusion will naturally happen unnaturally close to a Pd nucleus, simply from the mechanism of acceleration of the deuterons, through the K-shell holes. It's not a crazy idea, it's just something that needs to be tested in detail, through experiment. "The easiest experiment is simply to shine X-rays on a deuterated metal, and see the broadening of the K-shell line into a band (if it happens). This is an indication that the K-shell and the deuteron states are mixed up. You can also see this from enhancements of beam fusion on deuterated targets, and this has been observed in Russia, in the beam experiments, and the enhancement for the process is by a small factor, but the detection is through detecting neutrons, so it is blind to any three-body reaction that might be taking place. "It is also possible to test this by calculations, since the entire theory is known. For this, however, one needs the detailed alpha particle spectroscopy, all the unstable intermediate states, and there isn't good data on this (I looked), but it might be possible to make something qualitative using effective proton-neutron potentials. I don't know the state of the art on these models, or how well they reproduce alpha particle spectroscopy, but I am sure that it doesn't rule this out back-of-the-envelope, and if this theory fails, it fails only because of hard-to-calculate detailed effects."
