On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
Of the 33 cells, 12 were showing no anomalous heat, and no anomalous helium > was detected. 18 showed heat, and, from them, helium was detected within an > order of magnitude of the helium expected from d -> He-4. The more heat, > the more helium, within experimental error. (The measurements were rough, > unfortunately, only order-of-magnitude detection.) > Forgive my introducing a tangential but related question to this thread. An important possibility that has been raised by Ed Storms and possibly others is that there is a nuclear active environment that is only gradually formed, and that once this environment is sufficiently present, for example, on the surface of a palladium cathode, LENR will proceed more readily (for the present purpose, let's assume a single family of reactions here, excepting cavitation and so on). Implicitly this possibility is to be contrasted with a nuclear active environment that does not undergo modification over time and remains unchanged by the reaction. In the limiting case, there is the general understanding that known substrates are modified after a temperature spike above some threshold. Once a large excursion has occurred, substrates appear to become ineffective. Below this limit, however, the makeup of the nuclear active environment (NAE) could be dynamic or it could be static. One motivation for introducing a changing, cumulative NAE, as I understand it, is to explain the long initiation times that were needed in Pd-D electrolysis experiments, especially in the early days. Sometimes it took weeks or months before anything was seen. So we have two broad possibilities -- (1) a changing NAE and (2) a static NAE. One way to model (2) is to assume independent power excursion events that occur at some average rate X. I think this system can be studied with a Poisson distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution If the average rate X is high, the first excursion is likely to happen earlier than in a system for which the average rate is low, but there is variability, so you can't be sure. If the average rate is very low, you might not see even a single excursion during the course of your observations over a period of months, say. For a moderate average rate, you could see several events in close in time and then not see anything, at which point the experiment is terminated. Presumably if the NAE is dynamic, all bets are off and something altogether different could be happening. Two questions: - Do we have solid evidence that there is a dynamic NAE rather than a static one? Or is the evidence just barely above noise at this point? - If there is no clear evidence yet, is there a clever experiment that could settle this question for at least one system? Eric
