On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 1:16 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
You mention that gamma radiation is thermalized in some common manner. I > still find it difficult to believe that any high energy gammas are > generated during these reactions. How would all of these be captured? For this reason it seems unlikely that gammas ever form in the first place. Instead one might suspect their formation is efficiently short-circuited by another, faster channel, that is available only in a closed-in environment, in contrast to the open environment of a plasma. My own favorite possibility: the energy that would normally be emitted as a gamma photon is instead dumped into one or more nearby electrons, which are stopped in the material or gas, causing low-energy atomic transitions which gradually radiate away the energy imparted by the electrons as they come to a stop. Eric
