At 02:48 PM 12/7/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
OTOH, if trace tritium doping were used that number could easily be bumped up by a factor of 10,000, assuming the triple tracks are indeed from 12C(n,n')3alpha reactions.
And, another comment. The triple tracks reported as 10 per chip in the Naturwissenschaften report were using a silver cathode. It appears from other work of theirs that neutrons become far more common when the cathode is gold.
In the other direction, most C-12 breakups that occur in the CR-39 are not detected, they must occur within a certain region to be revealed by the etching.
It's possible that a much more reliable indicator of the neutron flux would be the far more numerous tracks from knock-on protons.
