On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 6:40 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
While theoretically possible, consider that, if you are lucky, 1 in 10000
> alphas
> would produce a nuclear reaction. 186W is only 28% of W. The amount of
> 190Os
> produced would be completely swamped by the existing W atoms. The same
> story
> goes for 194Pt, and even worse for 198Hg. In short I suspect you would be
> lucky
> to produce even a single Hg atom by this method.
>
Note that we also have a path to 196Hg starting at 184W, which has a 30.64
percent natural abundance, and to 194Hg (unstable) starting at 182W, which
has an abundance of 26.5, the three isotopes together comprising ~ 85
percent of elemental tungsten.
To get a better sense of the level of your pessimism, consider the
improbable scenario where the alpha-capture cross section is temporarily
1e6 barns for the entire duration of the capacitor discharge, on the same
order as the thermal neutron capture cross section for 135Xe. In this
scenario, do you think the final amount of Hg would still be unmeasurable?
In the link above, the mean weight of a tungsten wire in the experiment
was 0.713 mg, giving:
(7.13e-4 g / 183.84 g/mol) * 6.022e23 atoms/mol = 2.34e18 atoms of W,
assuming pure tungsten. If you had to make a wild guess, what fraction of
that amount would need to be converted to Hg, by whatever route, in order
to appear in the line spectra they were looking at?
Eric
