Here are a few of my thoughts after attending all three days of 2014 CF/LENR meeting at MIT. For Jed; you know I have been following Mizuno's work since ICCF14 and the results are now possibly the most significant of the conference from a practical point of view. You would not have had to worry about gaining weight at this meeting. Sandwiches, chips, cookies and soda in the hall outside the new and very comfortable lecture hall with no food allowed inside. No ICCF, this was a low overhead operation.
>From a technical viewpoint I found Peter Hagelstein's four talks extremely Interesting. They were essentially all aimed at showing that coherent energy transfer is necessary to explain transmutation results. The initial talk described work with Fran Tanzella in which a thin copper disk vibrated by an electric field at IIRC 15 MHz produced about 1.5 Kev xrays only after being coated with a thin film of mercury. The explanation is too complex for my two finger typing speed, but it involves an attempt to understand a Karabut gas discharge experiment which created collimated xrays from metal disks. This experiment is about inverse fractionation, the reverse of the fractionation that must occur if cold fusion reactions are to avoid creating high energy gamma radiation. The existing long life excited state in the mercury at the emission energy/frequency is required. I started to try repeating Peter's geophysical arguments about transmutation In the earth's crust but it gets very long and requires much evidence to gain any plausibility. You will have to wait for the video at Cold Fusion Now. As usual much of the most interesting information was shared in conversations between 2 to 6 people in the halls and during meals. Pam Mosier-Boss and Larry Forsley made a point that I had not fully appreciated before. The wide variation in CF neutron counts between various experimental groups is probably due to the type of counters used. Many counters are designed to deliberately reject large numbers of coincident counts to avoid counting charged particles and gammas. The radiation they found is not inconsistent with normal fusion branching ratios but the amount is so small that it is not telling us much about the main heat producing reaction. My MIT degree was over 50 years ago in EE and I have worked with low energy plasmas and optics for many years but my nuclear physics is limited and out of date. I may have misunderstood much of what I heard at the colloquium. George Holz Varitronics Systems [email protected]
