Interesting. I had some questions about some details, though.
Jones Beene wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence writes,
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
Sigh ... as previously noted I mentally mutated a proton to a neutron
here. This equation, it no balance...
path that seems likely to produce tritium. But then, where did the
neutrons go?
Back in 1990 when Bockris first found tritium in LENR - he believed that
it was technically NOT a fusion product at all, but instead was a
fission product (from the lithium electrolyte).
Beyond that, the specific details and rationale for this reaction may
have changed over the years -
...but recently a most unusual proposition is being floated around -a
'quasi-spontaneous' photofission of 7Li --> 4He +3H in which the 7Li
could be either natural, or a previously undescribed nuclear isomer
(deformed nucleus) of lithium.
Now, according to my old 77th edition of the Rubber Bible, this is a
rather endothermic reaction. Rounding the numbers to 4 places to save
typing, we have
7Li = 7.0160 amu
=====================
4He = 4.0026 amu
+ 3H = 3.0160 amu
--------------------
4He + 3H = 7.0186 amu
Net energy gain = -0.0026 amu = -2.43 MeV
So it's going to need a lot of encouragement to make it go, right? A
little bit of a nudge won't do it -- it needs a good sized whack.
Like most putative LENR reactions - this is largely unknown to the
mainstream. There is some basis for believing that at least some LENR
tritium reactions (with a lithium electrolyte) could be described as
"photofission." The closest thing for comparison in hot fusion is the
spallation reaction, in which a neutron is "boiled off" of a high Z
nucleus by the close approach (NOT Impact) of an approaching light
nucleus. The "photo" part comes from a photon-exchange.
The reason that a deuteron could conceivably do this - and not a proton
- is the partial electrostatic "shielding effect" of the neutron.
Shielding? The neutron is neutral, it's not generally expected to
shield anything. Superposition and all that -- the fields just don't
"see" it. Unless, of course, it has a significant dipole moment.
Googling that exact issue indicates that current theory suggests the
dipole moment of the neutron may or may not be nonzero, and no current
experiment has as yet resolved the question. (Or at least that's what I
think I saw....)
If there's enough of a shielding effect to change the rate of
collisions, near collisions, and nuclear interactions from the expected
value for 2 nucleons with unit charge and no shielding, then I should
think that effect would give a big enough handle to compute its dipole
moment. Certainly, at the least, it would offer proof that its dipole
moment is nonzero. That would be big news in the little world of
particle physics, I would think, which suggests that so far no such
shielding effect has been observed.
So, I conclude that you are speculating (a) that the neutron does indeed
have a nonzero e-dipole, and (b) that it's large enough to result in a
shielding effect in this case.
Is this more or less correct, or did my reasoning totally jump the
tracks along here somewhere?
The assumption being that for a brief time, the approaching-deuteron's
neutron could shield it from the nuclear positive charge of 7Li (which
can be also partly shielded by its 4 neutrons - a most unusual ratio for
a light nucleus) allowing that deuteron to get close enough to where it
will cause an electroweak disruption, and subsequent photofission.
IOW the 'occasional' deuteron (on Boltzman's tail of energy) will be
accelerated to decent velocity - at the surface of Pd as it is first
brought into the electron shell of the Pd but then expelled - so that it
actually goes part of the way inside the electron shell of the Li, and
it is able to get closer to this nucleus than would a proton of the same
velocity, because of the partial shielding effect.
It would not surprise the more cynical observer to discover that this is
already being done secretly by DoD.
Jones
