On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:33 PM, <mix...@bigpond.com> wrote: ...but wouldn't you expect 1/2 to fly away from the surface, and half to fly > into it? >
I would expect there to be an anisotropy. As I envision it, there's an electric arc pulling a mass of protons into a recess. For a fraction of a moment, the pressure is astronomical. During this brief moment a deuteron (the smaller species are all ionized within the arc) is forced up against a lattice site, coming from the direction of the open area and the current towards the wall of the substrate. Unless there's some kind of rotation during the moment of contact, if the lattice site is on the left and the deuteron is coming from the right to the left, I would expect the daughter proton to push off of the daughter nickel and be expelled back out to the right, which is the open area. I assume this would all happen too quickly for any kind of rotation of the nickel/deuteron system. Eric