At 11:21 AM 2/1/2010, Jones Beene wrote:
<http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/bosenova.htm>http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/bosenova.htm
Hmm
. No, it does not mention fusion as a
possibility, but what about the half the
original atoms seem to have vanished ?
Well the good folks at NIST got so many
questions and flak about this provocative claim
that they added an addenda and caveat to the article, later:
"The 'missing' atoms are almost certainly still
around in some form, but just not in a form that
we can detect them in our current experiment"
"The two likely possibilities are [mundane]
and do not indicate an energy anomaly.
But the "likely possibilities" are not mundane, this is what they say:
The fate of the missing atoms is still an open
question, but the researchers suspect that they
wind up either accelerated so greatly that they
escape the trap undetected, or perhaps form
molecules that are invisible to the detection system.
Sure. But ... what is the energy source for the
explosion? What would accelerate them so greatly
that they would "escape the trap undetected."
Sure, short of that, "molecules that are
invisible to the detection system" are a
possibility, but this also begs the question. To
suddenly expand as the atoms do, some sudden
release of energy must occur. Sure it's a mystery.
Unless it's fusion. With a small condensate, and
in the BEC state, any fusion could generate
enough energy to disrupt the condensate,
immediately. Energetic particles could be created
that would, indeed, escape the trap, but it might
be only one fusion, very difficult to detect a
single event and distinguish it from background
unless the experiment was specially set up to do
this. The matter in the condensate is pure
rubidium 85, with the electrons, and BEC fusion
may not act in the ways that are expected from fusion.
A compressed BEC is exploding. What is being
hypothesized by Takahashi and Kim are essentially
compressed BECs. The issue is really if such
condensates form at all; my primitive
understanding for the Takahashi theory is that
the confinement of two deuterium molecules in a
single lattice position for an extremely short
time produces an equivalent of very high pressure
or very low temperature or both. From Takahashi's
calculations, the time involved is about a
femtosecond before the BEC will fuse with a 100% rate.
To my knowledge, nobody has refuted Takahashi's
math, and the only problem is the question of
whether or not a condensate will form; the
presence of two deuterium molecules in a single
lattice site would be extraordinarily rare, and
so the question becomes "How rare?"
I would say that the condition of double
confinement would be highly disruptive to the
lattice site, but ... a condensate would be
contained with much less pressure.... all I can
do is guess and speculate. Four deuterons, as
nuclei, forget it. They can't form the condensate
and they would be exerting immense disruptive
pressure from Coulomb repulsion. So what might be
interesting would be attempts to study the
presence of deuterium molecules in the lattice,
close to the surface. Not easy to study, I'd
think. Maybe even impossible, maybe the only
signal we could get from inside the lattice would be a fusion event.
We do know that cold fusion is rare, very rare.
Fortunately. Wouldn't it have been embarrassing
if the University of Utah had vanished in a flash?
