This paper can be interpreted to be of significant interest in regard to the Rossi HotCat. But note that the authors do not mention that device, nor plasmon/polaritons, at least not in the abstract.
Maybe they missed the connection or more likely - I'm reading too much into their findings - but a cross-connection to Rossi is almost inescapable - since they do focus on the critical point of stimulation in the THz range in order to get semi-coherence in the soft x-ray spectrum. Lattice induced nuclear excitation and coherent energy exchange in the Karabut experiment by Hagelstein and Chaudhary "More than a decade ago Karabut reported the observation of collimated x-rays in experiments with a high current glow discharge. At the time, Karabut attributed the effect to x-ray laser emission. From our perspective, the development of a population inversion in the keV regime under the conditions of the experiment is problematic.... We have been interested in coherent energy exchange between a highly excited vibrational mode and nuclei for many years; such energy transfer would require that the large nuclear quantum be fractionated into a great many oscillator quanta for energy transfer from the nuclei..." END Comment: The authors go on to describe a design that emerged some years ago that involved a sample with many square meters of area driven in the THz regime, which if it worked would produce collimated x-rays from 201Hg near 1.5 keV. The connection to the HotCat is this. Rossi's design could be described as one in which many square meters of Nickel hydride (surface area) are driven in the THz regime, which produces collimated x-rays from 62Ni near 300 eV. It appears to me that efforts on many fronts are happening around the walls of the problem of understanding LENR. It may be a mistake to place so much emphasis on some new variety of a FRET mechanism which involves such a large wavelength jump (from microns to nanometers), but if you follow the evidence of the last few months, it is almost inescapable that this is where the path-to-understanding is heading. Quote of the day: Photocathodes produce electrons when hit by a laser beam....with metal photocathodes, ultraviolet (UV) lasers are the usual choice to excite photoemission, with photon energy near the energy needed to free electrons from metals.... But surprisingly, at the necessary high laser intensities, infrared light (IR) can be more efficient than even well-matched UV pulses. The secret: multiphoton processes using IR ... Howard Padmore, LBL Berkeley
<<attachment: winmail.dat>>
