Robin, After tossing around all the possibilities of the Sochi results, beta decay appears not to fit the data very well. The isotope anomaly at mass 64 is possibly not significant other than to show that a few percent zinc was a contaminant. Zinc could be involved in a role as a Mills catalyst.
Basically, Parkhomov's experiment is looking very much like what BLP should have done 20 years ago using zinc as a vapor-phase catalyst, in a hot reactor. Zn as the lowest Rydberg level catalyst with lithium and nickel at the deeper ionization levels makes a lot of sense. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] >This would be good news if true, since zinc is relatively cheap and beta decay is easily shielded. I suspect that it in fact decays via double electron capture directly to 64Ni. If so, you might not get any energy at all, because it would all go with the neutrinos...
