From: "explorecraft" > Allegedly > The Farnsworth type Fusor centers around kinetic ions > which apparently free the neutrons by collision.
Not exactly. The Farnswoth Fusor is an Inertial Confinement Fusion device which beneifts from spherical convergence, but the nuetrons are not collisional (spallation), per se, according to the expert spectroscopy which ahs been done, but actual (hot) fusion-derived. IOW, it is generally assumed the all the neutrons observed are the result of the two well-known lower energy D+D fusion reactions. In fact most of these do test-out to the expected energy ~2.5 MeV. Many college kids have built Fusors from spare parts that will output 10^5 fusions per second with an input voltage of 10kv minimum, or 20kv to get a large continuours flux. Officially, the textbook "threshold" for this reaction is anywhere from low MeV up to 2.2 MeV, which is the value most often seen. Now, every energy distribution has a statistical 'tail' - and the Boltzmann tail of a Maxwellian 2.2 distro should end in 3-4 std deviations so you can figure that either the Fusor is the largest single anomaly in all of physics... or ... else, that some unknown (hopefully, 'previously' unknown) source of 'hidden' energy is being input to power this reaction above its threshold of 2.2 MeV. What are the candidate inputs? Oh heck, let's cut to the chase. This is going to long enough and complicate anyway. Executive summary: 1) High voltage has the demonstrated property of forcing a 'neutrino oscillation.' One implication of this heresy is to test the hypothesis around power lines. Are nuclear transmutations seen under power lines? Well, believe it or not, there is one fellow in Kansas who has made a lifetime commitment to find out this one fact, and here is his website: http://old.jccc.net/~rhammack/ 2) Neutrino oscillation from the 'massless' variety, into the 'electron anti-neutrino' which is suspected to have rest mass is 3.4 eV, is hypothesized to drastically increase the cross-section for nuclear interaction. The nuclear interaction with a D nucleus is sufficient to both eject the neutron (in a process called stripping - and then with the added high field gradient- to force accelerated decay of that neutron) Although the neutron is net-neutral from a distance, it has a negative near-field which extends out about 2 x 10^-15 m (2 fermi). 3) The fusor is a fairly large volume HV device which should encourage neutrino oscillation and resultant interaction with deuterium nuclei. 4) In a HV field, beta decay can be accelerated a billion-fold under certain circumstances, depending on the degree of previous neutrino interaction 5) On decay of any neutron recently ejected from the D nucleus, it will give up a beta of about 500 MeV and a proton of enough energy to bring about D+D fusion by inertial confinement technique where the 'effective' convergence voltage has been raised a few deviations form the threshold (MeV). 5) The neutrons measured in a Fusor are indeed mostly fusion neutrons, but they represent a small proportion of the total neutrons which have been produced 6) Most of the stripped neutrons are 'overloaded' and decay in milliseconds. Not too long ago, researchers completed experiments at the National Accelerator Facility in Newport News in which a high-energy electron beam interacted with deuterons to resolve details below 1 angstrom. The results indicate that contrary to most theoretical predictions - the deuteron can be adequately described as consisting of two particles loosely bound together into a pulsating dumbbell shape: they concluded that "we don't have to worry about the quarks and gluons" in describing deuteron structure at higher energies. Although the neutron binding energy in the deuteron appears to be 2.2 MeV, plasmas of a few eV and can knock neutrons out of deuterons in such a way that the neutron goes free. That much is not in doubt. In 1935 Robert Oppenheimer and Melba Phillips made a basic contribution to quantum theory, discovering what is known as the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect, and to this day the implications of it are not fully appreciated, even among high energy physicists. In fact, I have a grave suspicions the widely used deuteron plasma cross-section table that is used by physicists all over the world was constructed without correction for neutron stripping reactions. The two physicists found that, when a deuteron is fired into a target atom even weakly, the neutron of that atom can be stripped off the proton and penetrate the nucleus of the target. Before, it had been assumed that since the deuteron and target nucleus are both positively charged, each would just repel the other except in high-energy collisions. The Oppenheimer-Phillips effect suggests that electric polarization, at low energies of impinging deuterons, may act to nullify coulomb repulsion to a certain extent but that the effect is limited to deuterons, because it is the only nucleus in the periodic table in which the overall positive charge can be self-shielded WRT another nuclei. Any free neutron should possess an average ~2.5 MeV initially if it comes from D+D fusion, and it “should” require almost that much input energy to split it off through spallation, but if the neutron comes from a stripping reaction, it is most often just a thermal neutron, ab initio, and one must look elsewhere to determine what happened to the lost 2.2 MeV binding energy. In the strange world of quantum mechanics, where “time shifting” is not a fiction, it would appear that the excess energy was effectively “borrowed,” but here is the kicker, it was repaid before it was borrowed and therefore is presently absent !! That is to say, in stripping, the energy deficit that appears to prohibit the reaction from happening in the first place comes from the energy that should have been left over once it happened. Most physicists who have not studied the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect assume that stripping is a form of spallation: which is a nuclear reaction in which a high-energy photon (i.e. EM radiation) causes a particles (most often, neutron) to be emitted from a target nucleus (usually a nucleus of high atomic number). Spallation is often initiated by a high-energy ion fired from an accelerator. In spallation, the accelerated particle does not enter the nucleus but instead travels close enough to initiate a high energy photonic transfer with that nucleus - that is, spallation is the result of a self-absorbed bremsstrahlung emission. We know this because many of those photons are not absorbed and are easily detected. Side note: Bremsstrahlung is German for "Braking Radiation" - EM radiation from a charged particle as it slows down (decelerates), or as it changes direction rapidly. Spallation, then, is best understood as a subset of Photofission: which is the splitting of an atom by the collision of a high-energy photon with the nucleus. In spallation, the photofission photon is self-induced. But Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping is neither traditional spallation nor photofission, at least insofar as there is no high energy photon transfer, and we know this because none are detectable - and they would be easy to detect if they were there - except for this qualification: extreme ultraviolet photons are universally absorbed by plasmas. OK, let me then qualify the preceding statement in this way: Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping, if it is spallation, could only be mediated by a photon which is not easily detectable, in other words, an EUV photon. This distinction is of particular importance in regard to Randell Mills hydrino theory in which EUV is implicated in certain novel hydrogen reactions. When neutrons are seen in a “warm” deuterium plasma, i.e. a few eV of energy, then Boltzman’s tail of that energy distribution will mean that some collisions will be at much higher energy - but “true” spallation would require 2.2 MeV photons and there are zero detected in these situations, in fact there are no soft x-rays even, so either we are dealing with a new kind of spallation, i.e. ultraviolet photon mediated, or more likely the neutrons are not the result of thermal collision at all, except to the extent that the collision changes the spin of proton WRT the neutron. In an earlier post, I mentioned the brilliant observation of several years ago by Robert Eachus, that flipping the spin of the deuterium proton, if it can be done, would actually result in a slightly negative binding energy, which could then lead to fission in the D2 nucleus. This would be the alternate modus operandi of stripping. And in the prior post, in regard to reclassified material from secret research in1955-58 at Berkeley, where Gow found neutrons in deuterium plasmas that could not possibly have been produced by thermal collisions, there were two points of interest: neutron production was quenched by an axial magnetic field but enhanced by a crossed field, implying but that the stripping might involve induced spin - and further that neutron yield did not rise when the applied voltage was increased, which is consistent with the spin explanation but not with other explanations. Before learning about the Gow work, the mental visualization that I had of stripping was that the shielded end of the D nucleus must head directly into valence band of the cathode target so that once its momentum carries it in far enough, then the field-drag on the proton from the valence orbitals "pulls" the proton away from the neutron, after which the neutron's momentum carries it on into the target nucleus - this visualization must be wrong- but what is the corrected version? Does the crossed magnetic field itself start the whole deuterium atom spinning so that at a certain resonance level the proton spin gets out of synchronization with that of the neutron? The scientific field of High Energy Spin Physics and spin/isospin disruption is evolving fast and it is difficult to make sense of many of the some of the new papers. But now you have the basic idea of the neutrino/stripping hypothesis, which is still a work-in-progress (with thanks to Frederick Sparber and others). Jones
