Eric-- One understanding that I have had is that in a quantum system angular momentum is quantized and must be multiples of h/2 that's Plank's constant (h). Also angular momentum must be conserved in what ever reaction happens to my knowledge. Also I do not know of any reason that He* could not happen with each new He* spinning in opposite direction with respect to a magnetic field and slow down incrementally with angular momentum distributed to the coherent system of electrons. The slowing down process may actually happen on time scale associated with nuclear transitions.
I know of know other ways energy could be distributed with no apparent kinetic energy associated with the new He nuclei. The total energy for both He* nuclei totals about 13 Mev, well below the amount you suggest it would take to cause a He-4 to fly apart. I am not familiar with the wave function that describes an alpha particle, but would guess the family of solutions include spin quanta, energy quanta and other parameters and that there are some solutions with high quanta possible. Whatever it is, it is a complex mathematical function. Lets keep thinking. Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Walker To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 9:28 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:mainstream physics paper bout the Hot Cat, co-author Andrea Rossi Hi Bob, The possibility you've been drawing attention to, that the result of the decay of the [8Be]* compound nucleus into two 4He nuclei with little linear momentum and a great deal of angular momentum makes for an interesting thought experiment. Out of curiosity, I calculated the energy that would be needed to break up an alpha particle into either tritium and a proton or 3He and a neutron, which would be the reverse of these two reactions: 3He + n → 4He + Q (19.3 MeV) t + p → 4He + Q (20.5 MeV) As I understand it, this implies that angular momentum sufficient to produce ~ 19 MeV of centripetal force would be needed to break apart a 4He into either 3He and a neutron or tritium and a proton. This suggests that a 4He can carry a large amount of angular momentum before it is likely to break apart. (I assume the process is probabilistic and that the force needed lies along a distribution.) Further comments inline. Eric On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 1:35 PM, Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote: However, I know of know reason why the light nuclei cannot have any spin quantum number--high or low. Any spin quantum is available. Further to the thought experiment, I think we should make a clear distinction between two types of "spin" -- there's the actual spinning motion of a nucleus (e.g., 4He), and there is the spin state of the nucleus. At higher rates of rotation, a heavy nucleus such as an isotope of nickel will reconfigure into a higher spin state, presumably through deformation. In such a state a photon may be emitted, with the nucleus relaxing into a lower spin state. Here my mental model is of neodymium magnets spinning around in a clump. When they snap together into a lower-energy configuration, a photon is emitted through the movement of the magnets as they snap together. The photon is emitted in a direction and carries away energy in such a way as to slow the angular movement of the spinning nucleus a little (by the amount of energy carried away by the photon). The participants involved in such a transition are the nucleons, and the energy of the photon that is emitted will correspondingly be in the keV or MeV range, which is in the nuclear range. A light nucleus, such as 4He, does not have a bound excited state. My understanding is that it cannot deform under high angular momentum into a higher energy state which will emit a photon when it relaxes. The 4He will either break apart into lighter constituents under centrifugal forces or it will not. But I'm guessing that the actual moment-to-moment velocity of the 4He about its axis of motion is in principle a continuous quantity. If this is true, perhaps the energy could be released to the environment in small amounts. Where the thought experiment gets interesting is in the supposition that you and others have already offered in this thread, that charged body such as a 4He nucleus that is spinning at an incredible rate will set up a magnetic field. This magnetic field could disturb nearby electrons, causing them to emit lower energy photons in the process. Although I do not see anything special in the 7Li+p to 8Be transition that has been proposed (and note Jones's point about the gamma that would be omitted in the process), I think the more general notion of the energy of a nuclear transition somehow being deposited in angular momentum and then released in small amounts is a very interesting one.
