Dear Stephen,
It is my belief, based on an extensive examination of the literature,
that the few neutrons emitted from cold fusion experiments are not the
result of a "cold fusion" process, but result from a process stimulated
by relatively high energy. People have suggested that such high energy
can result from crack formation. On the other hand, most of the tritium
results from processes that are initiated on dendrites located on the
surface of cathodes. Another similar environment might operate when gas
is passed through solid Pd. When the deuterium concentration gets
sufficiently high within the cathode or within particles of Pd alloy,
special locations initiate the He4 formation reaction. As a result,
each of these nuclear products result from a different process operating
at a different site. Confusion only occurs if all of the processes are
thought to happen at the same time.
Regards,
Ed
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
Iyengar, P.K. and M. Srinivasan. /Overview of BARC Studies in Cold
Fusion/. in /The First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion/. 1990.
University of Utah Research Park, Salt Lake City, Utah: National Cold
Fusion Institute.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IyengarPKoverviewof.pdf
This is important because it shows how much dynamic, promising
research was going on in India from 1989 to the mid-90s.
Unfortunately, nothing is happening there now, as far as I know. I
have heard that after Iyengar and the others retired, the enemies of
cold fusion moved in and took steps to prevent any more research.
I did a lot of work to prepare this paper, so you folks better read it!
OK, OK! I'm reading it! :-)
I just started looking at it -- got through the first few pages -- and a
couple of things stood out that I don't understand. It's going to take
a while before I get through the rest of it so I thought I'd ask about
this now rather than digging through the theory section first.
First, they apparently were seeing neutrons and tritium _right_ _away_
in active cells, as the Pd was being loaded. This is in stark contrast
to excess heat, which only appears after the Pd is fully loaded. Did I
misunderstand this? It seems weird. Does anyone have a theory that
explains why the tritium and neutrons might be produced sooner than the
first excess heat bursts?
Second, it took a while for it to sink in, but they kept talking about
"anomalously low neutron counts" -- tritium was found, with just one
neutron being emitted per ~ 10^7 tritium atoms produced. I don't
understand this. They were using pure D20, so H+D->T is not a candidate
reaction; in fact, it would appear that D+D->T+n is the only path that
seems likely to produce tritium. But then, where did the neutrons go?
Is it possible that something was fusing with the Pd itself?
I am depressingly ignorant of the theories that have been put forth to
explain CF (aside from a general impression that there are an awful lot
of them), but none the less this seems puzzling. Is there any generally
accepted ;-) "speculation", at least, that anyone on the list is aware
of, for how this could happen?
- Jed
