About three months ago, there was a discussion of the results reported in a paper by Dennis Letts and Peter Hagelstein.
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg64824.html http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LettsDstimulatio.pdf The hope was to find a cheap way to replicate the experiment using a comparable setup, so that the relationship between the beat frequency of the dual lasers and the power that was generated could be explored. I've finally had a chance to read the paper by Letts and Hagelstein. Aside from the finding of a correlation between wavelength of the laser light and phonon modes in the palladium, there were two other interesting details that were mentioned -- the effect required that a gold coating be applied to the cathode, and it depended upon the presence of a magnetic field of a specific polarization. About the laser stimulation, here are my thoughts after taking a look at the paper: 1. It is easy to think there was a strong correlation between laser stimulation and a general response in the system. 2. The correlation between specific frequencies and excess power was interesting but inconclusive. Regarding (2), there is a table that seems to show that the frequencies were indeed important. But I wish they had let the system thermalize with the environment before changing to a different frequency to dispel any questions about energy that had been previously added to the reaction carrying a reaction through subsequent applications of laser light at a different frequency. Finding (2) offers evidence for the proposed connection with phonon modes, in which there is a gradual transfer of energy to phonons in the system. But I wonder whether the phonon modes are simply a byproduct of some other property that is independently causing the reaction to respond to specific frequencies. I'm thinking here that there might be a kind of flux of EM radiation through the cathode that in general is at THz frequencies in the crystal and that gets stepped up to x-ray frequencies once it encounters cavities. In inertial confinement fusion in which a gold pellet is used, laser light is converted to x-rays when it hits the cylindrical walls of the fuel pellet. I wonder whether there might be something similar going on in cold fusion experiments -- sort of like wind having a general sound in the environment and then leading to an audible resonance when it encounters a whistle of a suitable size; or like water flowing at a certain rate through a riverbed and then speeding up significantly when it encounters irregularities. Concerning the application of gold to the cathode -- this is very interesting from the perspective of the thermodynamics of the system. The gold will have changed the reflection of the cathode and no doubt the spectral radiance of the system. In a different connection, I've been trying to work out what the spectral radiance of a 1 cm^3 block of solid nickel, and an equivalent block of nickel nanopowder, would look like, so that I can get a sense of the peak frequencies involved at some of the temperatures we've been hearing about -- 300 C, 600 C, and 358 C (the Curie temperature). I'm having a difficult time pinning things down, because there are many different things going on in such a system, including the kinetic energy of the atoms, the radiative energy and the transparency of the nickel to shorter wavelengths. But as far as I can tell, the spectral radiance of a nickel system will not be well approximated by blackbody radiation, although perhaps blackbody radiation will get you within an order of magnitude. That's fine, as long as you don't need to work with precise frequencies. In this general line of exploration, the gold mentioned in the paper by Letts and Hagelstein adds another interesting dimension to the problem. Concerning the magnetic field, it's interesting to note that it doesn't seem to be required in many cases. Is it possible that the field is giving rise to cyclotron radiation in the cavities in the palladium cathode? Eric
