Thanks for clearing-up that issue - and yes it does seem to fit well with your theory.
Do you think - apart from the Ratis construct - that there is a way to falsify the hypothesis of an external neutrino source being beneficial ? Years ago, when there was lots of talk about the Minos experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS . it seemed to me like it would have been highly instructive to operate identical LENR cells both in an outside of the influence of a neutrino beam. From: Horace Heffner Jones, Thanks for posting this URL. I think there may be a misunderstanding as to what the paper says. It does not say that a neutrino comes on scene from an external source and catalyzes a nuclear reaction. If you look at the Feynman diagram for the reaction proposed by Ratis you will see that the neutrino is not an input or output of the reaction, but only an intermediate state particle. What the W-neutrino reaction does is prolong an electron-in-nucleus state by converting a proton momentarily and reversibly into a particle consisting of a positron, neutron, and very heavy neutrino. The enormous mass of the neutrino, on the order of GeV, consists almost entirely of borrowed vacuum energy. Ratis thus proposes a deuteron involved in such a reaction is momentarily converted into what looks like a super-heavy di-neutron. He then goes on to calculate the half-life of the heavy deuteron state, i.e. the deuteron with heavy neutrino state, to be an astounding 10^-3 seconds, which is gigantic in nuclear terms, and the cross section to the electron capture to be 10 mbarn, which is small for nuclear reactions, but large for electron reactions because electron flux can be so huge, even in ordinary lattice conditions. Note that the reversible electron capture process also applies to a proton not in a D nucleus, but rather stand-alone. However, the half-life of that state should be much shorter. This reversible process might be expressed as: D + e <-> ((e+,n,v),n)* = D* or just: D + e <-> D* and in the case of just a proton: p + e <-> p* which is exactly how I defined the reversible deflated hydrogen state on page 12 of : http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/CFnuclearReactions.pdf I go on to state: "The existence of at least a brief small wavelength (p e)* or (D e)* state, of some kind, whether as specified here or not, can not be denied. Such a configuration has a greatly increased joint tunneling range. Electrons exist within the nucleus with small probability even in ordinary hydrogen. Electrons exist in nuclei prior to electron capture. Such electrons have high kinetic energy, high (relativistic) mass, and small size. Electrons pass through the nucleus with very high probabilities, i.e. high repetition rates, in some molecules and it appears there is a high probability of such transits associated with partial orbitals that are created in the lattice.38 The deflated state is proposed to be merely an elongation of the duration of the electron stay in the nucleus due to interactions of the electron and the positive quarks, especially the up quark. In classical terms, the deflated state might be viewed as consisting of roughly 104 orbits of an up quark per attosecond. "The reaction: p + e < -> (p e)* has no associated energy unless a photon emission occurs near the nucleus, but then that is another reaction entirely. The (p e)* state has an attosecond order existence. The transformation to and from the deflated (p e)* state is thus rapid and may in fact exist only in a probabilistic quantum wave form sense. It requires no stretch of imagination or credulity to accept the possibility a (p e)* state complex can tunnel as a whole, or be tunneled to, by a charged particle, with much higher probability than a bare hydrogen nucleus. Even paired electrons in superconductors have the ability to tunnel as pairs across a Josephson junction, a forbidden zone for not only a single electron, but impossible for a pair of electrons in any classical way due to their Coulomb repulsion when outside the superconductor. Engineering excess heat in cold fusion is thus largely a matter of engineering high probabilities and densities of deflated states, simultaneous with high tunneling rates within the lattice." In my articles I described a different process, nature and, lifetime for the deflated state. However, the consequences of the existence of D* or p*, by any mechanism, are the same, namely cold fusion and heavy element LENR. These consequences are spelled out to some degree in http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/CFnuclearReactions.pdf but that is only the tip of an iceberg. If you want to get a feel for the potential size this iceberg see: http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/dfRpt wherein I describe some new concepts, such as nuclear catalytic reactions or "NCRs", and take a look from a new perspective at the best materials for some forms of LENR. This is a work in progress. This currently includes only Reports A-J, but many more will be included. There are many more heavy element transmutation weak reactions than strong-only reactions, and these have not yet been included or described, but hopefully will be shortly. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/ On Jan 19, 2010, at 7:05 AM, Jones Beene wrote: If you try to follow all of the papers that come out in alternative energy - particularly the ones with an impressive or new slant on LENR - then in recent years you probably noticed a large number of Russian papers with impressive mathematical backing - yet were certainly not accurate in the conclusion. They seem to be strong on math-manipulation and short on experiment in the new Russia. My mind went numb trying to follow this "Main Formalism" argument in the paper below, so I skipped ahead looking for the non-existent experiment . nada . but even so, something tells me that there could be a glimmer of truth to the hypothesis presented. I do not know for sure where this paper falls, in terms of insight and importance, but a simple confirming experiment would be nice, and perhaps also extremely easy to pull off - <http://versita.metapress.com/content/qj816664m0302032/fulltext.pdf> http://versita.metapress.com/content/qj816664m0302032/fulltext.pdf . if you are in a country with lots of nuclear reactors, and claim to work for an "Institute of power engineering for the special application" - then it is almost a de minimis effort to find a source of neutrinos, and almost silly not to have taken a measurement of a simple operating LENR cell placed either near or away from the reactor, free of gammas etc but with an enhanced neutrino population - in order to get a quick determination of a significant difference that would give you some small real-world credibility. No, it would not prove anything, but if positive it adds some confirmation to the formalism - and that would lead to a proper experiment, perhaps one funded by DoE. One almost suspects that an experiment was performed with null results, but the authors were so proud of their formalism that they published anyway. Jones
