Once again, although the Focardi gain was in the tens of watts, the gamma radiation was about a trillion times too low to account for the thermal gain, but here - they did see transmutation also. This was a high quality research team and report.
Another interesting thing is that the transmutation does NOT favor an explanation of N-H fusion by proton addition – which is the direction that Focardi later went to, when he teamed up with Rossi. In fact, the appearance of iron, manganese and chromium – all elements which are lower atomic number than nickel strongly indicates a mechanism of alpha decay !… but … once again, at a level which is a trillion times too low to account for excess heat. Why do we have a side effect of alpha decay? Can it explain helium ash, in other experiments?? Curiously, all the active transition metals involved in the transmutation have strong magnetic susceptibility, and chemically – can be hexavalent. That may or may not be “apropos to anything” but hexavalency is strong suggestive of being catalytic for fractional hydrogen (UDD)… since it means that many Rydberg “holes” are possible in the various permutations. From: Bob Higgins I agree, this paper is a nice find. It used high end equipment - 4" NaI sensors and HPGe detector. It is presently beyond the scope of MFMP (at the moment). The advantage of the HPGe detector over the NaI is that it has a narrow detection bandwidth. The NaI detector has a 6.5% FWHM while the HPGe is an order of magnitude smaller. This wide FWHM smears out the emission lines in the spectrum to the FWHM width (impulse spectral line convolved with the peak response of the detector), making it difficult to detect the true spectrum in the presence of multiple lines. I wish we had one. BTW, this is the type of wonderful equipment you see in Piantelli's (Nichenergy) first class lab. Yes, the calorimetry in this experiment is crude. But most of you don't appreciate what a huge undertaking it is to make a credible calorimeter and produce a good thermal model for it. Just the calibration after the calorimeter is constructed is months of data taking and modeling. Then if you find a source of inaccuracy and fix it, you have to take that data all over again. As Mark said, detecting a COP > 1.2 is not too hard - even with crude equipment. If it is less than 1.2, there is going to be quibbling no matter what. I have said for a long time that detecting LENR with excess heat as the metric is a really hard prospect. Excess heat is not a sensitive metric and it is fraught with a lot of noise from measurement error and chemical activity. How then, is one going to find an experimental path to an improved result if all of your experiments show a metric of 0 or noise? You need something measurable to progress toward an improved result. Radiation detection is a very useful metric in LENR. It is very sensitive, it readily indicates something happening that is non-chemical, and it is quantifiable. The boron (borax, boric acid) is used as a neutron absorber. The natural abundance of 10B is about 20% and 10B has a huge neutron cross-section. It is also cheap and readily available. Why have a neutron absorber? Because, it is well known that a neutron flux will cause false gamma readings in an NaI detector. Neutron measurement could also be a useful metric. Neutron measurement is no harder than using a geiger counter, but the equipment is less readily available. Also, most OTS neutron detectors will not detect slow neutrons because the equipment is designed to detect neutrons from fission (>100keV). BubbleTech indicators and CR39 don't detect thermal neutrons. It is not hard to detect slow neutrons, but you must build your own equipment (not much more difficult than building a geiger counter). However, neutron spectroscopy is hard. MFMP will address neutrons going forward as well - at least to the point of having a neutron absorber. Stephen Cooke wrote: Great find Axil. Did you already forward it to MFMP? It's interesting that they use Boron as a neutron shield too. That might be important for them to know too.
