-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] An anomalous isotopic profile of mercury is found in CFL light bulbs that have been running for many hours - probably due to differential absorption into the bulb glass.
This is most interesting - and there may be other interpretations of the data, particularly if one subscribes to the notion of neutron tunneling between isotopes at a distance. (I do not, but it is worth a mention since differential absorption is equally problematic). There is a graph (in the abstract) which seems to indicate that one isotope is the main source of the anomaly, and two others participate. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es303940p?source=cen The largest apparent anomaly is Hg-196 which in nature is only 2 parts per thousand of all mercury. By comparison there is 50 times more of the 199 isotope. A smaller anomaly is seen in Hg-201. Both the 199 and 201 isotopes have nuclear spin and high magnetic susceptibility (for those who subscribe to a magnon-based LENR theory). Plus the magnetic moments of 199 and 201 are balanced plus and minus. This could be coincidental of course, and since neutron tunneling at a distance is not well-appreciated and requires a bit more energy than the CFL receives, it is no surprise that this QM connection was not mentioned in the original paper. The low isotopic percentage of Hg-196 in nature, and its mass variation from the more common isotopes, may mean latent primordial instability - yet there is a relative increase in CFL bulbs, not a decrease. Thus we may opine that this anomaly is probably not related to anomalous decay, and the results are also a poor fit with mass fractionalization. But if we renormalize everything into a flat fit - then we can possibly explain both the increase in 196, the larger decrease in 199 and the relative lower decrease in 201 via some kind of QM neutron tunneling which takes place over many hundreds of hours of constant exposure to electrical current. With this explanation, all spikes would flatten and eliminate the mass variation seen in the graph. The major little problem with this explanation can be called of "musical neutrons" but we are talking about very long exposures to electrical current, and any QM rationalization could suffice - such that Hg-199 would be seen transfer neutrons to 201, thus transmuting to 196, while at the same time 201 gains mass in relative proportion to everything but 196. IOW the isotopic mass shifts disappear to a flat line when one proposes that the two mercury spin isotopes transfer mass in the form of neutrons from the higher spin state to lower spin state of the two NMR isotopes. What seems like a larger increase in 196 is merely due to its low starting percentage compared to the other two. Thus the variation will be flattened - to the extent one accepts QM neutron tunneling. It's quite a stretch of course ...
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