On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 9:10 PM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
Obviously, the next questions are something like this: was the depletion of > the zinc-64 (compared to the starting level) due to its slight inherent > radioactivity, and was the decay vastly accelerated? If so, then we must > accept that accelerated beta decay can provide excess heat and possibly > avoid detection. Other mechanisms are possible but 64Zn has an extremely > long half-life, yet it is known to beta decay. This thought occurred to me as well. The decay I considered was a double-electron capture to 64Ni. The difficulty with this and other weak-interaction decay modes is that the number of nucleons does not change. By contrast, what was reported was a decrease in the 64 mass peak by nearly half. This observation is what lead to an earlier comment of mine that there might be a large experimental uncertainty. Or there's something changing the number of nucleons for 64Zn and/or 64Ni, in which case I personally have no conjecture to propose. Eric
