On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 3:39 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
> What does the spark of DGT offer that heat alone seems to neglect in the > ECAT? > This gets back to the earlier thread on the ion beam and glow discharge experiments. I suspect that some of what they're seeing in those experiments is real LENR, and that it is hasty to write it off as hot fusion. You may recall an experiment that was recently mentioned in which 350-1000 eV beams of deuterium nuclei were accelerated towards 1 um deuterated titanium foils, and out of the back came ~5 MeV particles (identity unknown). This is a little like dropping pennies onto the ground on one floor of a building and having cannonballs fall from the ceiling below. It's easy to lose sight of the difference between 350 eV and 5 MeV, but it's large. About the difference between a glow discharge/ion beam type arrangement like Defkalion's and a purely thermally driven one like the HotCat, it seems we can only speculate at this point. My current line of thinking for the ion beam stuff -- there is something in the electronic structure of the substrate that is at work here, be it plasmons, or shielding, or cracks, my favorite, sufficient deceleration in the fields of heavy lattice atoms to keep the interacting nuclei close to one another for a prolonged period of time sufficient to achieve tunneling and sharing of momentum with the spectator lattice atom. (Note that this also opens the possibility of a similar kind of interaction happening in a *gas*, e.g., heavy noble gas atoms like xenon, with sufficiently strong binding energies for the inner shell electrons.) Eric
