At 09:02 AM 10/2/2012, Daniel Rocha wrote:
It doesn't rule out. They just find lower neutron production rates,
which are merely 200x smaller.
That's an error plus it's misleading. They find 300x smaller as a
rate, *using an optimistic value of the mass renormalization factor.*
Essentially, they are pointing out what appears to them as a serious
oversight in the W-L calculations.
I do not consider myself competent to judge the predictive math. If
there were specific evidence for the neutron production, it would be
reasonable to look for other errors, and to consider the W-L
conjecture as being possibly valid in spite of possible errors, but
the elephant in the living room for W-L theory is that the
consequences it would seem to predict are not observed.
Slow neutrons have high capture cross-sections, "ultra-low-momentum
neutrons" will simply have very high capture cross-sections. They
will be efficient at producing transmutations ("neutron activation").
The behavior of neutrons is well-known. W-L wave away the missing
gamma rays by suggesting that the "heavy electron patches" that allow
neutron production also heavily absorb gamma rays, but this effect,
which should be easy to confirm, has not been confirmed, and we
haven't even seen primary experimental evidence for it. Years ago,
asked about such evidence by Richard Garwin, Larsen responded,
"proprietary." Familiar?
Even if somehow the gammas are absorbed, so efficiently that none
escape, the transmutations produced would follow patterns that are
not observed. Direct, single-neutron transmutations are not observed
at high rate in PdD experiments. ("High" means "anywhere near the
rate at which helium is produced" The evidence could allow
very-low-rate transmutations.) W-L explain the production of helium
by proposing multiple transmutations, but if X is the rate at which
single transmutations are produced, the rate for double
transmutations would be approximately X^2. Since X is low, for all
known LENR, the single transmutation product would be found in much
greater abundance than a double product.
This is the opposite of what is seen. Helium is the *only*
significant ash from palladium deuteride LENR. No other product has
been found to be quantitatively correlated with excess heat.
W-L theory is a hoax. It is presented as if it explains the
experimental evidence, but it doesn't. It is a set of wild
conjectures that explain only one piece of experimental evidence, and
the conflict with the rest of the evidence is ignored by Widom and
Larsen. It is promulgated because it allows some to say, "it isn't
fusion!," thus proposing to some set of skeptics that, after all,
they were right. Fusion was impossible.
Unfortunately, the evidence is strong that the Fleischmann-Pons Heat
Effect does result from some form of deuterium fusion. It's still
rebuttable, but this rough theory (fusion by unspecified mechanism)
is so well established that the community stopped attempting to
measure the reaction Q more accurately than has been done, which
would further nail down the fusion conclusion. Most researchers don't
have access to accurate measurement of helium, and measuring total
helium produced is quite difficult. It's possible to criticize the
"single accurate measurement" attempt by McKubre at SRI, that gave a
value very close to the 23.8 MeV/He-4 predicted from deuterium
fusion, hence there is room for further confirmation/disconfirmation,
but ... researchers have moved on and are more interested in other
things, most notably in bringing reactions under control, in making
LENR more reliable.
The "Fusion Conclusion" does not specify mechanism. "Fusion," in
this, refers to the relationship between fuel and ash, which
determines the energy released, assuming that no energy escapes from
the calorimetric environment as uncaptured radiation.
"Fusion" does *not* mean "d-d fusion," because there are other
possible reaction paths.
And deuterium -> helium for palladium deuteride experiments does not
necessarily tell us anything about what is happening with nickel hydride.
2012/10/2 Gigi DiMarco <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
The following paper:
Low Energy Neutron Production by Inverse-beta decay in Metallic
Hydride Surfaces
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Ciuchi_S/0/1/0/all/0/1>S.
Ciuchi,
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Maiani_L/0/1/0/all/0/1>L.
Maiani,
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Polosa_A/0/1/0/all/0/1>A. D.
Polosa,
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Riquer_V/0/1/0/all/0/1>V.
Riquer,
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Ruocco_G/0/1/0/all/0/1>G.
Ruocco,
<http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-th/1/au:+Vignati_M/0/1/0/all/0/1>M. Vignati
has just been uploaded to ArXiv
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6501>http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6501
The paper addresses the WLT as presented by Widom, Larsen and
Srivastava in peer-reviewed journals and presents very strong
objections to the theory that can be summarized as:
It has been recently argued that inverse-beta nuclear transmutations
might occur at an impressively high rate in a thin layer at the
metallic hydride surface under specific conditions. In this note we
present a calculation of the transmutation rate which shows that
there is little room for such a remarkable effect.
It is worthwhile to say that some of the authors are preminent scientists.
Luciano Maiani is a San Marino citizen physicist best known for his
prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Lee Glashow and John
Iliopoulos. He became Director General of CERN, serving from 1
January 1999 through the end of 2003. Moreover, he is the
past-President of the Italian National Research Council (CNR, 2008-2011).
Giancarlo Ruocco is deputy Dean at Rome University La Sapienza and
Director of the Physics Department. He is in charge for research
coordination activities at La Sapienza.
The paper will be (or has been, actually I do not know) submitted to
peer-reviewed journals to be published; probably in the same journal
in which the WLT has been proposed.
Since WLT forms the basis of a number of experimental approaches to
LENR's (including Brillouin and NASA) maybe it's wise to read and
try to understand the paper.
Cheers
GG
--
Daniel Rocha - RJ
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
