In reply to William Beaty's message of Sat, 4 Apr 2009 10:56:03 -0700 (PDT): Hi, [snip] >From: Pierre Carbonnelle > >Together with Bill Beaty, I'm pleased to introduce Alternapedia to the >Vortex community. It can be reached at http://en.alternapedia.org/ [snip] I have made a few minor corrections to http://en.alternapedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion%2C_by_Pcarbonn and added a sentence to the theory section. The explanation involving the Mössbauer effect is wrong. In fact the entire reasoning may be wrong.
I would like to change it, but am not sure yet exactly what to replace it with. For an explanation of the Mössbauer effect see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6ssbauer_effect In short the 30 keV is the energy of the gamma-ray, not the energy of the phonon. The phonon energy is typically in the range of thermal phonons at room temperature, i.e. a few meV (small m). Since in the CF scenario under consideration no gamma-rays would even be involved, I'm not sure whether the Mössbauer effect is even relevant. I believe this is the argument the skeptics have previously tried to make. Furthermore, I think that the recent CR-39 results show that the energy of the reaction is actually lost through emission of fast particles, which previously went unnoticed because they are charged, and hence never made it out of the dense environment of the experiment. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
