As I remember from his papers, he actually tested in some tunnels to improve his neutron detection S/N. What he found was that the neutrons were always undetectable in his system, but the tritium measurement was 10 sigma confident. It set a limit to how many orders of magnitude the neutron branch of his reaction must be below the tritium branch - something like at least E6 below the tritium branch.
I have not seen him reporting transmutation of the host metal - perhaps it is only catalytic. I do remember seeing what Jones said about having switched to mu-metal and seeing a boost in tritium production. Other than this host metal and its internal purity, I think his gasses are highly pure (five 9s). On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 3:38 PM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> If the process was neutron capture, where are you proposing that the >> neutrons are coming from? >> > > The thought was that if the amount of tritium was on the order of the > background count for neutrons, the tritium might come from very low levels > of free neutrons generated within the system itself by some unknown process > (e.g., spallation). If the level of tritium is significantly above that of > the background neutron count, this hypothesis wouldn't make sense. > > I am only vaguely familiar with Claytor's work. He may actually be seeing > low but significant levels of neutrons at times. Some researchers have > reported them at low levels. > > I have a hard time believing this can occur without overcoming the Coulomb >> barrier such that either the proton or the neutron in a deuterium is in >> contact with the neutron of the donor nucleus. Once they are in contact, >> and the strong force is in play with both nuclei, the neutron would >> statistically be transferred in some cases, but doing this would still >> require overcoming the Coloumb barrier at low temperature. >> > > Do you have any ideas for donor nuclei? This is possible with nickel, > palladium or lithium, but simple transfer reactions are endothermic, > implying that the deuterons must be energetic, even if there's no Coulomb > barrier getting in the way: > > d + 61Ni => t + 60Ni + -1563 keV > d + 105Pd => t + 104Pd + -837 keV > d + 7Li => t + 6Li + -994 keV > > There are some interesting exothermic fragmentation reactions: > > d + 105Pd => t + 50Ti + 54Cr + 18133 keV > d + 6Li => p + t + 4He + 2559 keV > > Eric >
