Perhaps the most important "exotic" active materials available at
moderate cost to independent researchers, for investigating energy
anomalies, are the so-called "half-metals" : specifically the
half-metallic transition metal oxides.
At one time, metal oxides were all lumped together as ceramics. Then
some started showing up with properties more towards metallic and these
were labeled as cermets. Then with the advent of audio/video recording
and even the early IBM disk drives, materials appeared which were
ferromagnetic, and ceramic, and contained little or no iron. Some were
ferrites (if they had iron) and others were labeled half-metals if they
were electrically conductive.
Perovskites are the most intensely studied half-metals these days due to
high temperature superconductivity. Double Perovskites such as Sr2FeMoO6
are claimed to be half-metals with T(subC) higher than 400K, which is of
course above room temperature.
CrO2 is the most well-studied example of ferromagnetic half-metal with a
strong magnetic moment, containing no iron, and has been widely used in
magnetic recording tapes for half a century. In recent years, it has
attracted substantial interests in the semiconductor industry because of
the half-metallic property and the potential for future spintronics.
There is a decent clue (IOW a not-yet-disproved hypothesis) that in LENR
the NAS or active spot begins as a "hole" in any spintronic material,
and that the hole may be engineered or accidental. And of course the
hole may allow nuclear tunneling... or as an alternative, may force a
"below ground state" condition.
Of course, if you took the metaphorical "blue pill" you may not be
inclined to envision a hole at all (nor a whole)...
In half-metal CrO2, one spin channel is metallic and the other is
insulating, resulting in an unusual transport property of 100 % spin
polarization. The Fermi level lies in the partially filled 3d band of
the majority spin, whereas in the minority spin, the Fermi energy falls
in an exchange-split gap between the occupied oxygen 2p band and the
unoccupied chromium 3d band.
Conventional superconductivity should not occur in any ferromagnet.
Theory predicts that the current is carried by pairs of electrons
(Cooper pairs or equivalent) in a spin singlet state, so conventional
superconductivity decays very rapidly when in contact with a
ferromagnet, which normally prohibits the existence of singlet pairs. It
has been predicted that this rapid spatial decay would not occur if spin
triplet superconductivity could be induced in the ferromagnet."
Now for the long-winded denouement of this complicated train of thought:
Keizer et al. report a Josephson supercurrent through the strong
ferromagnet CrO2, from which they infer that it is a spin triplet
supercurrent. "Our experimental set-up is different from those envisaged
in the earlier predictions, but we conclude that the underlying physical
explanation for our result is a conversion from spin singlet pairs to
spin triplets at the interface. The supercurrent can be switched with
the direction of the magnetization, analogous to spin valve transistors,
and therefore could enable magnetization-controlled Josephson junctions."
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006Natur.439..825K
At any rate, CrO2 appears to be the most easily accessible, and
affordable, material available today to investigate the crossover area
between spintronics and LENR (hydrino).
The main reason that CrO2 is mentioned prominently here, when the real
interest is palladium, is that there is some indication that one of the
oxygen atoms becomes an ionic "jumper" and unlike the situation in true
ceramics, can jump around from molecule to molecule like hydrogen does
in water, or like valence electrons do in any metal. The second reason
for this interest is that an oxide of palladium, or more precisely an
adsorbed oxygen atom in Pd may act in a similar way. The third reason is
that IF there does exist the cross-connection between spintronics and
LENR, then CrO2 may become a prime candidate for an active cathode material.
Well, that is my Sunday spin on LENR-spintronics: Half-metal
breakthrough or half-baked myopia ?
Jones
