Looks like the Vo-server was down yesterday, as two-day old messages
appeared this morning and at least one post which needed correction is
still apparently lost in cyberspace... One always suspects some kind of
high-level tampering when this happens ... not that anyone with good
sense would pay serious attention to this forum, but still... it makes
one revert to using abbreviations. I suspect that "neutron" is some kind
of flag for the snoops, and very few of our Corporals stationed in the
German-message-screening-brigade have good sense but ... anyway...
Neutrons - if they could ever be produced 'on demand' are arguably the
most valuable commodity on earth. If we posit that Avagadro's number of
them will weigh about a gram, then a kilogram could be worth
$500,000,000 or more. More on the assumptions behind that ball-park
calculation later. For now, the question is: are there any easy ways to
produce them in milligram quantities per second, on demand?
Many ductile materials, even certain steels, become frangible when
subject to cold. Perhaps a simple elongated nucleus is similar.
At the sub-angstrom level, a nucleus such as deuterium could become
*less* stable at lower temperatures in a magnetic field - but also with
a narrow range of overlapping RF (at a resonant frequency to either the
proton or neutron). Obviously if this happened, NMR techniques, such as
are used in Medical diagnotiscs, would show some anomaly at low
temperature. It is an open question as to whether or not anyone has
actually performed NMR on deuterated materials at cryogenic
temperatures, close to absolute zero - and then had the foresight to
look for free neutrons. It would be interesting to know.
Begin with what we know or suspect about the D2 nucleus - in a blown-up
mental image: it is a highly elongated nucleus, similar to a "barbell"
of two spheres separated by at least one unit of diameter of either
sphere. One end of that barbell is slightly heavier, so there is
built-in axial instability anyway, and if we now substitute for the bar
(connection between the two spheres) the mental conception of a "spring"
(gluon-spring?) so that there is also a constant oscillation between the
two - then we are getting close to the needed level of imagery. We want
to slow the oscillation down at the same time as we increase the amplitude.
Now - we add that the info that both of these two ends have a magnetic
moment, but a significantly different moment, and a significantly
different NMR resonance. At a certain level of magnetic field, then (say
the field provided by a permanent magnet) the two components of the
sucleus will being to mutually align but not quite. When one end of the
barbell is stimulated at a resonant RF - will the "bar" - i.e. the gluon
spring, as it were - ever be extended further (either axially or in
another vector) than the reach of the strong force (which BTW is not
much further afield in this nucleus than the furthest extremity of its
normal elongation) ?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Anybody got a suggestion on how to finagle some spare time on an NMR
machine?
Jones
