On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: In short, very roughly, a 1 W unshielded power source would double the > background rate. >
Thank you for the numbers. Twice background doesn't sound like all that much; presumably this is near the threshold of detection, and a signal would be easy to swamp out with noise? The alphas would be Ron's alphas, at 22.9 MeV. I'm trying a thought experiment where the secondary spallation neutrons are somehow minimized -- I don't have an explanation for why this would be the case at this point, but I'm curious anyway. The setup I'm thinking of is something like this: | air | glass | heavy water | cathode surface | active region | cathode interior | Here the cathode surface is assumed to be very thin. In the scenario I'm trying to better understand, where the spallation neutrons are somehow avoided, I'm wondering what the activity would like like from the vantage point at the far left, at "air". The alphas could potentially travel for quite a while through the cathode before encountering a lattice site, I think I remember reading, during which time they will dissipate energy by way of low-level EMF. I assume that EMF will be stopped by the cathode surface, the heavy water and the glass, before reaching the air -- is this a mistaken assumption? Like you say, there will no doubt be inelastic collisions, metastable nuclei and gammas. But assuming little neutron activation, do you have a sense of what the activity would be like outside of this kind of "shielding"? The question I'm trying to get at is whether we can say for sure that the number of energetic particles (in this case alphas) in the cold fusion experiments is not commensurate with heat. It seems like this might be a hasty conclusion, but this is just a hunch at this point. Eric
