Speculation alert: Will development of the technology of hydrogen-loaded nickel usher in a new paradigm for going small - the "pico age"?
The mention of Cooper pairing brings up potential correlations between high temperature superconductivity, matrix spacing, extreme loading and LENR. In regard to hydrogen loading, this pushes towards the sub-nanometer realm. Cooper pairing of nucleons and extreme loading was first mentioned on Vortex in 2004, if not further back. Needless to say, we are bit ahead of the curve, even if "pico" was almost unheard of then, and "nano" was all the rage. High loading can happen without Casimir cavities, but the highest possible loading may be contingent on proper interstitial spacing which is an order of magnitude tighter than "nano" of the Casimir variety - in the range of a few angstroms (hundreds of picometers). Further complicating the analysis - this ~250 pm ideal matrix spacing may require adjacent cavities (or pits) in the range of a few nm in order to "feed" in nucleons as they pair (or shrink, if you subscribe to Mills). Both Pd and palladium hydrides are superconductive at low temperature. Nickel and nickel oxides are superconductive at low temps. I do not have any information on nickel hydride superconductivity. This is probably due to a curious fact - nickel does not load well unless it is the major alloy with another metal which can "open up" the interstices by about 50-70 pm. As little as 5% of another transition metal seems to work "miracles" of loading with nickel. Here is a little-known factoid, should CF ever make it to "trivial pursuit" status - Laufer's "Theory of superconductivity in palladium-noble-metal hydrides" preceded P&F by three years. Another paper of interest: Lipson et al. Evidence of Super-stoichiometric H/D LENR Active Sites and High Temperature Superconductivity in a Hydrogen-Cycled Pd/PdO. Nice slides. http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LipsonAGevidenceofa.pdf Also, it should be noted that *high internal pressuriztion* may have the same entropy reducing properties as very cold temperature. With Pd the loading ratio must get near 1:1 before this becomes a factor. Nickel alloys will load at ratios over 4:1 and this could be the single most important reason that Ni-H works better than Pd, but it should be noted that pure nickel does not load well at all ! Go figure. Once again, this whole field seems to turn on minute spacing differentials within a metal matrix, with FCC vacancies between 1-3 angstroms (100-300 picometers). We have only been fully immersed in the "nano-age" for a decade or two - and already it looks like Ni-H technology has the potential to usher in a "pico-age" ! Nano - we hardly knew ya'. Jones
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