Do some research into the Shukla-Eliasson effect. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0914.pdf
On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > A few days ago I wrote this about a 1989 paper in Physical Review B by a > group at UC Berkeley: > > What the 1989 paper did not look at was the possibility that you might be >> able to excite lattice atoms into Rydberg states, where some of the >> electrons have additional energy, but not enough to ionize and be ejected >> from the atom. >> > > Since then I have followed up with a question on physics.stackexchange.com, > asking whether Rydberg states are possible within the bulk of a metal [1]. > Ben Crowell provided an interesting response, which I think has been > unfairly downvoted (without an explanation) -- I would not be surprised if > he is correct. > > A question that was linked to my question was raised by Ron Maimon toward > the end of 2012 [2]. He felt that NiH posed a challenge for his theory, as > he did not know how to link the two together. He does not like the idea of > p+d as the reaction behind NiH, as he thinks that critical parameters would > be too small and that the rate would be too low to create a chain reaction > sufficient to keep things going (see the comments to his question for a > discussion). He clarified that in order for appreciable fusion to take > place, the precursors must approach to within a very small distance of one > another -- .0001 to .1 Angstroms. This for him ruled out any possibility > of electron screening being important, as it would involve distances from > .1 to 1 Angstroms, which are on the wrong scale to do anything interesting. > > His complaints are thought provoking. On one hand they give a better > sense of the scales involved. On the other they make his specific theory > less rather than more likely in my mind, for the deuterons in PdD must > approach *very* close to the lattice site nuclei, which are little > pinpoints in a big sea of electrons and empty space. This makes clearer > the difficulty that Robin pointed out sometime back, i.e., what is it that > is causing the deuterons to converge upon the lattice sites in Ron's > theory? Now that I have a better mental picture of the scales involved > (.0001 to .1 Angstroms), I am a little doubtful about the specific > mechanism that Ron proposes. He talks about the deuterons being in > banded states, but I'm not familiar enough with these to get a sense of how > they are thought to work. > > One thing that is very nice about his theory, however, is that it provides > a way to quickly dispose of the mass energy that must be dumped upon the > creation of a metastable [2d]* two-deuteron resonance, or [pd]* resonance, > as has been discussed here, in order to avoid the usual fusion branches and > gamma rays. In Ron's account, this energy is electrostatically dumped into > the palladium lattice nucleus. As a consequence, his theory implies fast > 4He, and it is fast 4He that keep the reaction going. What I will now try > to think about is seeing whether that energy might be dumped instead into a > nearby electron in the ambient electron cloud that fills much of the volume > of the metal. In this case, the daughter 4He would be nearly motionless > instead of fast, and you would get a electron on the order of 24 MeV instead. > That would imply lots of Bremsstrahlung, for sure. But it would also > provide a way to carry the reaction forward, this time, by changing the > electron charge density and increasing screening, through some as yet > undetermined mechanism. > > The new outline leaves at least three important unknowns to be sorted out > -- (a) How do the p's and d's acquire sufficient energy to fuse, even with > screening? (b) What causes the electron charge distribution to change? > (c) What happens to the Bremsstrahlung? > > Eric > > > [1] > http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74651/can-rydberg-states-exist-within-the-bulk-of-a-metal > [2] > http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43960/is-there-any-reproducible-tested-evidence-for-ni-h-cold-fusion > >
