On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 6:46 PM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote:
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. > Indeed. Since the standard deviations for neutron counts and tritium are not necessarily the same (perhaps tritium is far easier to measure than neutrons), one could potentially have had a situation where a 10 sigma result for tritium was consistent with tritium counts that were on the same order the background count for neutrons, if one was reasoning without the benefit of any knowledge about tritium and neutron measurement. But this presentation seems to clear up the matter: https://youtu.be/GEUaJ6AHkF8?t=3m1s Here Tom Claytor says that the ratio of neutrons to tritium is 1e-8, which seems to imply that the tritium cannot come from the capture of free neutrons by deuterium. Eric
