Excellent series of posts Axil. Till now, I still thought of electrons as particles that flow along the nanotubes. I could not get a handle on how a nanotube would force a one-dimensional flow and how charge could accumulate on the nanotube. Your posts made it clear. Thank you.
Now a question. In you opinion which type of nanotube would be better for LENR charge accumulation. Single-Walled or Multi-Walled. I believe I can tune my nanotube production reactor to produce more of one kind or the other. SWNT would have a smaller diameter while MWNT would have many concentric tubes would typically be several tens of nanometers in diameter. Would electrons behave the same way with MWNT as in SWNT - that is, it will wrap around the MWNT as it does with SWNT. My guess is, (and this is a wild guess), is that MWNT being of larger diameter would attract electrons to bind with it which are of longer wavelength to fit the larger diameter of the entire tube. Longer wavelength means lower energy, right? So, MWNT would be better as it will bind lower energy electrons. Lower energy plasma electrons is better cause that means a lower input energy to provide, which means the threshold is easier to achieve in a reactor environment. I'm pretty sure my understanding of Quantum Mechanics is inadequate, so let me know what you think. Jojo ----- Original Message ----- From: Axil Axil To: vortex-l Sent: Monday, June 11, 2012 1:37 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:The many worlds of charge screening The one dimensional world has its own unique rules and ways of acting. The three dimensional world of charge screening that we described in my last post has absolutely nothing in common with the one dimensional world we look at now. We will now fall down the hard to understand rabbit hole of quantum mechanics. For example, most single-walled nanotubes (SWNT) have a diameter of close to 1 nanometer more or less, with a tube length that can be many millions of times longer. The structure of a SWNT can be conceptualized by wrapping a one-atom-thick layer of graphite called graphene into a seamless cylinder. The diameter of the SWNT is consistent up and down its entire length. When the SWNT absorbs an electron, quantum mechanics(QM) makes sure that the energy(aka wave length) of the electron exactly fits like a ring around the diameter of the SWNT. Because the diameters of the SWNT are so consistent, so are the energies of the electrons that the SWNT selects to ride on its back. In plasma, there are electrons of all types of wavelengths (aka energies) to choose from, so the matching up process between electrons and SWNT’s has plenty of electrons to work with. By the way, the wave length of an electron with energy of about 1 electron volt is about 1 nanometer. So the electrons that orbit the SWNT around its diameter are all the same energy. This means that the electrons more properly called Holon quasiparticles are coherent where all the individual electron wavelengths all add together to form a single coherent huge quantum mechanical Holon density wave. Holons (also known as chargons, from English hole or charge, plus the -on suffix for particles) are one of three quasiparticles, along with spinons and orbitons, that electrons in solids are able to split into during the process of spin–charge separation, when extremely tightly confined by one dimensional electron flow. Here again we must think in terms of waves to understand that spin, charge, and orbital densities are waves that can exist on their own decupled from the electron. The electron can always be theoretically considered as a bound state of the three, with the spinon carrying the spin of the electron, the orbiton carrying the orbital location and the holon carrying the charge, but in certain conditions they can become deconfined and behave as independent particles. These electrons all orbit the SWNT in lock step like an army on parade. This exact order makes the total electron surface charge on the SWNT a Bose Einstein condensate because of bosonisation. This is why Miley’s discovery that cracks harbor superconducting electrons is important. Thinking about electrons as matter waves now becomes important. The single coherent waveform of the super Holon with a total charge density of many thousands of ordinary electrons can now cover and screen a number of nearby atoms in a highly concentrated way because the Holon that is closest to these atoms “QM share” the same waveform as all its identical brothers. The spins of all these surface electrons alternate and are spread along the entire length of the SWNT, So the spin density wave is decupled from the coherent charge density wave as usually happens in a one dimensional superconductor. http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1369702110700304-gr2.jpg The SWNT now completely exposes the atoms in the vicinity of the coherent and superconductive SWNT to any positively charged proton that is drawn into the area. This is how a nickel nucleus fuses with a proton to become copper. This topological materials mechanism is not unique. Any one dimensional material that supports forced electron flow will do basically the same thing including cracks. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: The many worlds of charge screening The behavior of a given system is properly understood within the particular context of that system. Somebody once said that everything is relative. In this regard, we will get invalid results if we mix apples and oranges. As a example, Let us consider charge screening under to equally valid yet completely different contexts. In the three topological dimensional context, charge screening is properly described by the Friedel Oscillations: wherein we accurately consider the electron in the context of its wave like nature. To properly describe charge screening in the three dimensional world, we must set the conversation in the context of something called the “charge sea”. Imagine for a moment, a portion of three dimensional space filled with a large number of positive and negative charges that can move around freely. This is the usual description of lots of different things in the ordinary world, like salt water where positive sodium and negative chlorine ions float freely through salty water or a chunk of metal where negative electrons wander freely around a periodic array of lattice confined atoms. We will call this material the “charge sea”; it is made of an equal number of mobile positives and negatives. Now, what happens if you bring a big, heavy, external charge and put it in the middle of the charge sea? We will call this charge an “impurity” in the charge sea. Most people think of this situation in the context of point like charges where the first group of negative charges are drawn in very strongly to the impurity, and form a dense coating around the surface of the impurity. Subsequent negative charges are drawn in less strongly given that the impurity now has a smaller effective charge since the first group of negative charges is now sitting on the surface of the impurity. As a result, this screening atmosphere is densest at the surface of the impurity and becomes less dense as you move away — more distant charges are attracted less strongly to the impurity. Taken as a whole, this screening atmosphere completely compensates for the total charge of the impurity: the impurity gets completely “screened”. In most situations, the screening atmosphere is simple and well-behaved. Its density decays exponentially with the distance from the impurity. This view of charge screening is not totally correct. If you change the context of charge screening to a cold piece of transition metal, something unexpected happens The positive impurity draws negative electrons to itself, as you would expect, but they don’t just form a nice decaying pattern of particles. Rather, the electrons form a funny rippling structure “stone in the pond” like wave pattern circling the impurity. At the surface of the impurity is a region with high a concentration of negative charge, as you would expect in the way we usually think in terms of particles, but it is followed by a circular region with positive charge, then another ring shaped region of negative charge, then a positive, and so on in an alternating sequence. The unexpected rippling pattern is called a “Friedel Oscillation”. It is bizarre to have rings of positive charge surrounding a positive impurity! Different wave patterns correspond to different electron energy profiles. In general, as the electron energy’s increase, the ripples around the impurity have a smaller wavelength and a tighter wave pattern. This unexpected property is explained by the fact that electrons are not point particles but have a size proportional to their energy. The electron has a size to it which we call its “wavelength”. The wavelength of the electron is a property of its energy: more energetic electrons have shorter wavelengths. You can think of the wavelength as the size of the wave that the electron “surfs on” as it moves through space, or you can think that the electron is itself some kind of wave with a particular size. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to say that an electron sits at an exact point in space. An electron occupies a region of space, and the size of this region is called its wavelength. In a cold metal, all the mobile electrons have nearly the same energy, and therefore nearly the same size. In context of quantum mechanics, though, each of those negative point charges has a size to it. Each negative charge is not sitting at exactly one spot, but is “smeared out” over a region of space defined by its wavelength. We can think of it like screening by negatively charged rods. These negative rods are initially pulled strongly toward the surface. This determines the charge density not just at the surface, but for the next distance unit of ½ wave length distance after it. This creates a pattern of charge density that is actually the sum of the all the electron wave strengths of the all the electron charges at any given point in space. The first tranche of the total electron charge determines the density for the next tranche of the total electron charge at distance defind by the wavelength of the charge which when summed over the total charge density sets up a cycle of overcompensation and correction. As a result, you get a rippling density of charge. The reason that you only see Friedel Oscillations at low temperature is because higher temperatures result in a wide range of electron wavelengths with fewer electrons in each tranche. If every electron has a different wavelength, then there is no cycle of “collective overcorrection” because every charged rod is a different length. So Friedel Oscillations, like every other quantum phenomenon, only appear at small temperatures. However, charge screening is another story in the superconductive one dimensional world of the crack and the nanotube; now that we have defined some terms and have everybody thing right, we can now set the conversation in terms of that new context. To keep the length of this post reasonable, the one dimensional charge screening case will be covered in the next post. Cheers: Axil
