At 02:06 AM 10/1/2010, Rich Murray wrote:
I have a bad feeling about the durability of the SPAWAR claim, which
presents an analysis of the energies involved in a single triple track image.
Well, do realize that there are two very separate issues here. Three, in fact.
1. Did SPAWAR find neutrons? That finding does not depend on a single
image. There are many that have been published in various places.
Could SPAWAR put on the Net some high-resolution full-page images as
3D stereo pairs, from several angles, of this feature, comparing it
to similar photos of triple tracks in the same setup from a
calibrated neutron source?
That would be nice, eh? Now, this is the big problem with CR-39. What
you get depends greatly on etching conditions, and etching itself,
apparently, may depend on overall radiation exposure. To really do
this right, you'd use CR-39 exposed to the CF cell, and some of the
same CR-39 from the same production batch, exposed to neutrons, and
you would do this with more than one cell and you would also have
control chips with the same storage history....
But the reality of work in this field is that people have done what
they had the time and resources to do. Running a CF cell, when you
have everything ready, takes two or three weeks (for the work SPAWAR is doing).
One of the problems here is that Rich may be thinking that the idea
that CF is fusion depends on the results of these experiments. No,
there is other far more conclusive evidence. That evidence, however,
does not prove that the reaction took place in these cells, for
excess heat isn't reported. If it were, we could, as an operating
assumption, assume that the reaction happened.
But the primary reaction produces helium and is known not to produce
significant neutron radiation. The SPAWAR work on neutrons is
important because these would indicate a very low level of secondary
reactions, giving us some clue as to possible hot products from the
primary reaction. We know that most of the primary reactions don't
produce hot products; Hagelstein has recently published a very low
limit for the energy of these products, but we should realize that
the Hagelstein calculations do not rule out small amounts of hot
products being produced, just large numbers.
Also, were the plastic cells reused?
It would be silly. I bought a hundred of these cells for $100.
How thick are the cell walls, and what are their resistance,
dielectric breakdown voltage, and dielectric constant?
They are acrylic plastic, at least the cells recommended for the
Galileo project -- which is what I bought -- are. The walls are 0.063
inch thick. I'd think you could use a standard value for acrylic plastic.
Have any tests studied whether ionizing radiation, microshocks, and
the complicated electrochemistry in the cells can alter the cell
wall resistance, dielectric breakdown voltage, and dielectric constant?
Are you aware, Rich, that the earlier claims for the efficacy of an
external electric field are not being repeated? The cells involved
here didn't use an external electric field, and the magnetic field
was likewise not being used. Pam later wrote to Krivit that her
initial inclusion of a magnet in the Galileo design was based on work
with different types of cells, and I think she implied that the
magnet had no effect on the CR-39 findings.
You have raised, with your electric field arguments, a rather obvious
point that I don't find was properly addressed in the original
electric field publication. The electric field, inside the cell,
because of the conductive electrolyte, would be very low across the
conductive electrolyte, the voltage would be equal to the current
(very small) times the resistance (appreciable but still relatively
low, compared to the acrylic walls.) My guess is that there would be
no measureable current at all, that current supplied to the plates on
either side of the cell would be entirely accounted for by leakage.
Given that there is an appreciable field set up by the electrolytic
current, that would, I'd expect, be much larger, my sense is that in
the electric field reports, they were seeing normal variations that
they interpreted as due to the external field. But I don't know what
steps they took to eliminate that possibility. With many of these
publications, I -- or we -- don't have access to all the details.
"Microshocks" could be pretty irrelevant. There are very small shock
waves detected with an extremely sensitive detector incorporated as
the substrate for the cathode itself. My sense is that these might be
on the same order of magnitude, or smaller, than the effect of sound
from someone talking near the cell. As to ionizing radiation, the
radiation levels involved in these experiments are very, very low.
That they would have any appreciable effect on the acrylic on the
sides of the cell, which is the acrylic involved, probably, would be
extremely unlikely.
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/395murray.html
Rich, let me lead you through this. Back up to the original palladium
deuteride work. There is a single, widely-reproduced experiment, with
unanimous qualitative results and very high agreement on the
quantitative results. It's very simple, and it's amazing to me that I
haven't seen this argument, given how often it is repeated that the
problem with cold fusion was the lack of a repeatable experiment.
It's not an easy experiment, but "easy" was never promised. It's also
expensive, because it involves measuring helium. This is a
description of the protocol:
1. Set up a CF protocol, any of the ones that you think might produce
excess heat. It's also okay if you vary the protocol during the
experiment. Do this for a single cell, but it's better if you do it
for many, and the closer the design of the many, the better. But they
may also vary in design.
2. Measure excess heat and measure helium, using the best methods available.
3. Report the results for each cell.
That's it. The results are astonishingly uniform. If no excess heat
is found, no helium is found. If excess heat is found, usually helium
is found, and it is within range (an order of magnitude has been
said) of the value expected from deuterium fusion (23.8 MeV). If very
careful work is done to recover all the helium or to estimate
accurately what has not been recovered, the result is very close to
the expected value.
Storms estimates, from four particular studies out of a total of
twelve studies that he uses to confirm the correlation -- there are
no studies that failed to confirm this -- that the value is 25 +/- 5 MeV/4He.
Notice that from this approach, the early "replication failures"
where they also looked for and found no helium were not "replication
failures," they, in fact, confirm the corrrelation. No excess heat,
no helium. Obviously, though, if all the tests found no heat, there
wouldn't be any information on which to base the value of the
correlation or to determine its uniformity. However, if there are
enough cells tested, and even only a few find excess heat, but there
are enough of these -- ten would be plenty! -- and none of the
non-heat cells showed helium, and all (or nearly all) of the
excess-heat cells showed helium, this would be a highly significant result.
I conclude that, from the published data -- and this is confirmed in
Storms's review, just published in Naturwissenschaften, and there is
a copy on lenr-canr.org --, there is a fusion reaction taking place
in palladium deuteride, the fuel is deuterium and the product is
helium. However, from other evidence, the reaction is not d+d fusion.
Now, once we know this, it is utterly unsurprising to find a few
neutrons! It would, in fact, be expected from odd rare branches or
unusual secondary reactions at low cross-section. Most of the
previous reports of low neutron emission (apparently these come in
bursts sometimes) were discounted because there were too few neutrons
to be part of the main reaction. Contrary to what was claimed, this
was not, by any means, the first report of low-level neutron
radiation from palladium deuteride.
What was different about it was the means of detection, SSNTDs,
showing levels that were clearly above background. The front-side
charged particle results I still consider somewhat speculative.
Definitely worth further investigation, but this is difficult to do
because of the possibility of front-side chemical damage; it can be
very difficult to distinguish this from radiation damage of various
kinds. To give a minor hypothesis: chemical damage from close
proximity to the cathode during electrolysis causes an acceleration
of etch rate (this was may have been observed by Scott Little), which
causes many more background tracks to appear from the deeper etch....
What I've seen from SPAWAR and other Galileo replications is looks
tantalizing but not conclusive as to front-side tracks.
But back-side results are stunning. Those tracks could only be caused
by secondary charged particle radiation caused by neutrons. All the
alternative hypotheses I've seen don't match the actual results. True
triple-tracks are not merely three pits close to each other. In the
best images, you can see a groove at the bottom of each track, and
the three grooves come together at a single point. These are C-12
breakup tracks, it's clear.
Now, it takes precise etching conditions to reveal this pure
triple-track. From the front side, you won't see it at all, even if
you etch down into it, because by the time you get significant pits,
you have entirely removed the source point. You see it on the back,
because, there, you etch, first, the alpha tracks where they are
separate, but they grow as you etch. Eventually, you reach the bottom
of them, the common point of origin, which will be down inside the
track. SPAWAR publishes dual-focus images, showing the top and bottom
of the pits.
But CR-39 is a difficult material to interpret, because it is a solid
material. The etching time is long, and in hamburger areas, the
entire surface has been removed. Is this due to radiation
overexposure or chemical damage or some combination? Hard to tell.
This is why I'm using LR-115, not to mention that radiation-detection
grade CR-39 is difficult and expensive to obtain. The detection layer
with LR-115 is only 6 microns thick, and short etch times are used.
The images I've seen from alpha tracks are detailed. I think I've
misinterpreted them in the past. I saw cones, i.e., I could sell a
thick track, but it had a tail that was conical, down to a point. I
imagined that the thick track was a high-energy alpha track, and that
the tail was where it had lost its energy, until it became too low an
energy to disrupt the red cellulose nitrate that is the detection
material used with LR-115. (The red material makes it far easier to
see the damage!)
Pam kindly pointed out, in a mail that was forwarded to me by Jed
Rothwell, that tracks are not formed in LR-39 by particles *above* a
certain energy, which may be one or a few MeV. Basically, the amount
of energy lost per cm. to the material is too low, which wasn't what
my apparently defective intuition was telling me, that a hotter
particle would produce more disruption. Rather, I was interpreting
the tracks backwards.
The cone's point I was seeing was where the particle had lost enough
energy to start showing disruption, and the more it lost energy, the
thicker the track, until it became a maximum size. Now, what will
triple-tracks look like with this detector?
I'm planning on setting up the detectors like this: Inside the cell,
the cathode wire is held against the cell wall. It's in a known
position. On the outside of the cell, there is a holder that has been
made out of acrylic and two LR-115 films are held in registration
with each other by pins through two drilled holes, and they are held
flat against the cell wall by another piece of acrylic with the same
holes drilled in it. The films both have the 6 micron detector layer
held to the inside, so these two layers are adjacent. The outer 100
microns on either side of this stack are the polyester film base. No
charged particle radiation, in any known range of energies, could
pass through the acrylic cell wall and the polyester. This will be a
pure neutron detector. The tracks observed, if I get the same results
as SPAWAR has shown, for a gold cathode substrate, will be mostly
proton knock-on tracks from neutrons. I may see an occasional triple
track, but very few neutrons will produce one.
Don't be confused by the triple-tracks. They are dramatic, but not
nearly as important, in terms of estimating flux, as the far more
copious proton tracks.
Give me time, if I find neutrons, and I'll have time-segment plots,
because there is nothing preventing me from changing the detector
films during the experiment, it will all be exposed on the outside
and easily changed without disturbing the inside. I might even do
this during the first run.
