Hi, James, The phenomena would be easily explained by the Faraday Ice Bucket experiment. The coulombic repulsion of deuterons is like the repulsion of the gold leaves in an electroscope. The E field inside the noble metal crystal vanishes like the E field inside the ice bucket.
In both cases, the inverse-square coulomb's law repulsion re-asserts itself, and the repulsion returns, when the charged objects are removed from their respective Faraday cages. Best regards, Matthew
