At 02:25 PM 2/1/2010, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
On 02/01/2010 01:25 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> 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.
I haven't been following this thread, but...
Rubidium-85 ... FUSING?
Isn't that endothermic? We way past iron here.
Could be. Any experimental data? Specific to Rubidium-85?
I thought you needed something like a supernova to make reactions of
that sort go.
Uh, there might not be any other way to "make that reaction go." The
nucleus would be highly neutron-deficient? Anyone know what it would do?
I certainly don't know!
> A compressed BEC is exploding.
Not from Rb-Rb fusion, I would think!
Okay, another idea?
The reaction might indeed be endothermic but still generate
disruptive forces. I'm just trying to think outside the box here, a
bit, and my real interest, of course, is in what would happen with
deuterium under similar conditions, if this could indeed be done with
deuterium.... Might not be possible at all.
I can't assert that some impurity is there. But....
What if in the condensate, there is a rearrangement, and some
electrons get absorbed by protons. That would convert the nuclei to a
lower atomic number, and the nuclei would then have a positive charge
and would repel each other, hence the "explosion." They might also
become undetectable.
It wouldn't be fusion, as we ordinarily think of it, but it would be
a nuclear reaction. The energy balance I don't care to try to calculate!
And there are dozens of ways for me to be wrong and only a slim
chance that my blathering makes any sense at all. Caveat emptor. At
least with this discussion! I'm here to learn, mostly, not to impress anyone.
