Damn! What a coincidence.
I was just reading the Brown article. I think he's got it almost cracked - Dipole attraction exactly cancels monopole repulsion at very short H-H distances. A must-read ! Jones From: Mark Iverson [ ---------- Comment 2 ---------------------------- Julian Brown January 27th, 2011 at 12:32 PM Congratulations Mr Rossi. You may have saved the planet. The anomaly has a relatively simple explanation: Effective potential for H in Ni and Pd is very flat because of surrounding countercharge, so ground state of H has gaussian width of about 0.3 Angstrom. h-omega transition to 1st excited state in harmonic well is about 50 meV (8 THz). This frequency is not attenuated over lattice cell dimensions, so transitions are unscreened. Ground->excited -- exited->ground interaction between neighbours causes first excited doublet of two H to mix into bonding and anti-bonding states. Splitting, large because of 0.3A width, may be greater than h-omega, so bonding state is actually true ground state. Dipole attraction exactly cancels monopole repulsion at very short H-H distances. Gaussian tail from neighbouring cell can overlap with other H without any exponential die-off, resulting in nuclear contact and some sort of p+p reaction. Multisite coherence forbids emission of short wave quanta, so normal n,p, gamma channels are forbidden. See http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0703715 for the details. -------------------------------------------- Here is the abstract for the arXiv doc: H-H dipole interactions in fcc metals J.S.Brown (Submitted on 27 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 12 Apr 2007 (this version, v4)) It is observed that interstitial hydrogen nucleii on a metallic lattice are strongly coupled to their near neighbours by the unscreened electromagnetic field mediating transitions between low-lying states. It is shown that the dominant interaction is of dipole-dipole character. By means of numerical calculations based upon published data, it is then shown that in stoichiometric PdD, in which essentially all interstitial sites are occupied by a deuteron, certain specific superpositions of many-site product states exist that are lower in energy than the single-site ground state, suggesting the existence of a new low temperature phase. Finally, the modified behaviour of the two-particle wavefunction at small separations is investigated and prelimary results suggesting a radical narrowing of the effective Coulomb barrier are presented.
