A further reply from Ron, below. Eric
"The stopping distance is around 600 atoms according to Spaandonk, and I don't dispute the theoretical value, but I don't know if this is accurate, it can be larger or smaller, because the calculations are theoretical, and this energy regime is comparable to the energy levels involved, so experiment is the best way. "The reason that the deuterons have unnatural concentration near the nucleus is precisely because of the repulsion--- they turn around at a distance of 100 fermis from the nucleus. This is because their kinetic energy is equal to the potential energy of an electron-hole in a K-shell, so that you get stopping at exactly the K-shell radius, give or take a factor of 2. "The turn-around region is where the wavefunction is most concentrated, because semi-classical wavefunctions go as 1 over the square root of the speed. This enhancement is like a beam-focusing device. "Robin is right that there are two parts to test--- the fusion and the Auger transfer. The Auger transfer one knows how to test, but this is likely to work, but the details of the banding are still mysterious. The other part is the fusion rates. This is confounding to me. "The beam experiments did not see excess heat, because the number of fusions is ridiculously miniscule, it's a beam with order 10^10 particles, not a macroscopic amount of stuff. They see fusion products only. "The way I was hoping to investigate the 3-body fusion is through a theoretical model of the proton-neutron force, and the experimental data on the alpha-4 resonance. This should allow one to theoretically calculate the electrostatic matrix element between the high energy states and the ground state, although it's hard, because the resonance data is so crappy. "Other than that, I'm stuck, because I can't think of any circumstance where you would see 3-body events other than in cold fusion. So the actual rate needs to be attacked theoretically, and it's annoyingly hard. "I'll think about it again soon, I have been doing biology for the past months. Thanks to Robin for the considered comments." On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 1:41 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: The stopping power of a material to 20 keV deuterons should be about the > same as > for 10 keV protons. There is a handy online calculator available for the > latter > at http://www.physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/Star/Text/PSTAR.html. > > Since Pd is not on their list of materials, I chose Silver which is next > to it > in the Periodic Chart, and hence has almost the same electron density as > Pd. > This results in a CSDA range of 0.182 microns, or about 630 atoms. >
