On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 3:24 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: I realize what you meant, but during normal decay reactions, the energy is > not shared with an ensemble of electrons, so why would this case be special? >
I'm not really sure. There's just enough of doubt on my part about the applicability of known behavior to this specific situation that I don't write off the possibility. Here are some potential explanations: - In the case of a short-lived nuclear transition yielding a gamma that occurs from the rearranging of nucleons, the nucleons reside in a field of strong positive charge, despite the presence of an electron cloud (I suspect). Perhaps the charge density has to be negative or strongly negative for a gamma-yielding transition to short-circuit to nearby electrons. - Maybe when it comes to gamma-yielding transitions, there is more natural activity than we think there is, and a lot of the transitions are short-circuited in the proposed manner, leading to heat rather than gammas. As observers outside of the system, we see only those gammas that escape for some reason. - Maybe there is a qualitative a difference between metastable transitions, which take a while to occur, and that of an extremely short-lived resonance like a [dd]* pair. The faster the transition, the more likely it is to short-circuit. Because we generally study dd fusions in a plasma system, this skews the data we have to work with, because there are few electrons nearby. (In cases where a dd fusion occurs during thin-foil ion bombardment, there is an anomalous screening effect.) - Perhaps the circumstances of the production of the alphas are a little different than simple fusion in the vicinity of lattice sites; for example, if there is electric arcing which is drawing the precursors near one another (which may or may not be d+d), the arc in conjunction with the electron cloud may provide a different environment than is witnessed in other contexts. Eric
