On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
This stuff is beyond my pay grade as well, but I'm willing to venture my > own proto-theory: spin is central to LENR. There are bosons (spin 1) and > fermions (spin 1/2). (I have no thoughts at this point on particles of > more exotic spin.) Fermions keep apart and bosons tend to glob together. > Fermions can be thought of as the constituents of matter and bosons as > so-called "force carriers." Electrons and protons are fermions, so they do > not collapse into one another. But if in the right circumstances you could > somehow "rotate" the spin of the electron so that it was no longer 1/2, the > electrostatic charges of the non-fermionic electron and the fermionic > proton would cause them to be strongly attracted to one another; or, at > least, not to be held apart if they should encounter one another. From > there you would get a neutron, possibly at a greatly discounted cost -- you > could get a handful of them for 20 cents each instead of 100 dollars. Any > emitted gammas would bounce around hollow cavities in the cathode until > they in turn bind together with a free electron and then reorient its spin, > causing the reaction to continue. > I appreciate that it is reasonable to call this out as crackpot material. But I should at least elaborate on some of the observations that can be accommodated by this explanation: - Nano powder Ni has been found to be a good cathode (lots of interstices). - High levels of hydrogen and deuterium loading are needed in order to yield a sufficient numbers of free protons. - Laser perturbation sometimes sets off a reaction. - Early experiments could run many hours before heat was observed. - There are observations of transmutations of heavier elements. - There are few to no observed gammas. - Impurities in the cathode have sometimes improved a reaction. - There are indications that the nuclear-active-area is in the vicinity of the surface of the cathode. Some further questions to be explored: - What would you see in a cloud chamber? Would you see beta particles or something like them? - Are there no gammas, or only low levels of gammas? - Is the nickel or palladium activated after the reaction? What are the observed ratios of isotopes, before and after? - If you did monte carlo simulations on the flux of neutrons through a palladium or nickel system, what would happen? Would the system be little changed, or would you get a lot of transmutations into something else? (My guess: not too much would happen.) Eric
