One curious fact emerges from a close reading of the many Arata papers relative to what he labels as "pycnodeuterium".
I have never seen this explicitly mentioned in a connect-the-dots fashion, but if it has been put forward by someone else, please let me know the citation so that proper credit can be given in the future. We may have hinted about a Millsean connection on Vo in the past, yet Arata certainly never mentions it; and he is probably unaware of CQM. To backtrack, this pycno-species of Arata is NOT normal deuterium but is a previously "activated" version of deuterium, which has already given up quite a bit of heat in the DS cell or cathode, but has NOT yet transmuted or fused into anything. That is a most important point, even if some trace helium is seen. The trace Helium is many orders of magnitude too low at this stage but some pycno can proceed to full fusion at any time. IOW what we see in the AZ experiments is clearly mostly deuterium which has given up excess heat in the process of what Arata labels as temperature inversion. It has become first activated in a matrix and then depleted, but not transmuted or fused. To quote from the 2005 paper: ".Without D2 or without sample such as Pd fine powder, Tin never went higher than the given temperature Tout. On the other hand, when the samples absorbed pycnodeuterium, then Tin was always higher than Tout, that is temperature inversion." For those of us who believe in the broader field of "fractional ground states", with or without Mills - and admittedly Mills theory is incorrect in many details - the best physical description of pycnodeuterium, which goes well beyond what Arata is suggesting - is that the species is a fractional ground state, having become an energy-deficient form of "shrunken" deuterium, which has already given up lots of heat. This shrinkage also explains the enormous interior 'self-generated' pressure which is documented in the DS-cathode patent of 1995. I am trying to be careful in explaining how an energy-deficient form can also be labeled as "activated" since the activation relates to the next stage in a two stage process; one that proceeds with increased probability due to prior depletion. This is probably a semantic roadblock where skeptics will try to focus criticism. This process begins with adsorption of D2 into a catalytic matrix, with or without electrolysis. The dynamics of that may involve the relativistic theory of Fran Roarty. Importantly, the alloy which is an order of magnitude most effective for "pycno" is not palladium itself, but instead is mostly nickel with a few percent palladium. That rings of Mills going back to 1991. Going further, then, what Arata Zhang discovered and documented - and labeled as pycnodeuterium could well be the predecessor state to LENR. Pycno may or may not be a necessary predecessor state (sine qua non) for all forms of LENR, but the evidence bodes in that direction. This state of prior "energy depletion" of deuterium which he labels as pycnodeuterium elegantly explains both how "cold" fusion can proceed at lower energy input parameters than hot fusion; the delay which is often necessary; and also the lack of strong gammas in the aftermath. Stated simply, much of the expected excess energy was already given up prior to the actual nuclear reaction, via the non-nuclear "shrinkage" reaction which pushed it below ground state, giving up heat in the form of UV radiation. That is the part that BLP got right wrt hydrogen, and hinted at, back in the early nineties wrt cold fusion, but it took these good experiments by Arata/Zhang to actually document the transition into two distinct steps. Jones
