On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
The specification of the ultra-low energy neutron was engineered to make it > virtually undetectable because it doesn’t move far from the nucleus before > its immense nuclear absorption cross section results in its almost > immediate incorporation into the nucleus immediately after its creation. > Nickel, to take one example, has a high neutron optical potential [1]. When neutrons are very cold, they will reflect off of the nickel atoms to a certain extent. A typical LENR experiment shows power on the order of watts to tens of watts. If neutron capture were responsible for that kind of power generation, there would be so many neutrons being generated that a significant portion would reflect off of the nickel substrate atoms, thermalize and exit the system, to be picked up in GM counters. When neutrons have in fact been detected, the levels have usually been at the threshold of the neutron detector. One presumes that if there were a large number of thermalized neutrons exiting a system, they would would be in quantities sufficient to go well beyond the threshold of detection. None of these are my own arguments. I am repeating what I have heard elsewhere. Importantly, I am unfamiliar with the quantities that would be needed to model this system and test these assumptions. But it seems reasonable to ask an explanation predicated upon neutron capture to address these points. Eric [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracold_neutrons
