On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.115003 > > Neutron Bursts in Lab Lightning [... snip ... ] > We here at vortex know that LENR is an electromagnetic based reaction. > There have been complaints here and elsewhere that observing 10 MeV neutrons emitted in bursts from a lightning discharge is in no wise LENR. Complaints made here have been expressed with moderation, and ones elsewhere have been made with great self-assurance. I have seen two reasons given that such a phenomenon (assuming it exists) is not LENR: - LENR is understood to be a low-energy phenomenon, and the GeV-levels of energy to which particles in a lightning discharge are accelerated are more than enough to account for fusion of the hot plasma variety. The complaint here amounts to the idea that the most likely explanation in this instance can be found in decades-old textbooks -- we're just looking at old-time fusion. - Another complaint is that one of the main observables are 10 MeV neutrons, and - neutrons are not generally seen in LENR, - and the ones that have been seen are well below 10 MeV. My point here is not to dispute these complaints or say they are incorrect; on one level they are very reasonable. My point is to urge some caution and humility. We cannot simply choose willy-nilly to enforce a demarcation around an empirical phenomenon such as LENR and exclude what might well be a secondary effect, one that might be made possible only by the main process going on. Doing so would imply detailed knowledge of what is behind LENR, which we do not yet have. A similar note of caution can be made in connection with the D2O cluster impact fusion experiments carried out by Beuhler, Freidlander, and Friedman at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1989 and after. They accelerated clusters of D2O ions up to 225-300 keV at TiD and TiH foils and saw 3 MeV protons coming off of the TiD foils at rates implying dd fusion that are anomalous for the level of energy to which the ion clusters were accelerated. (Recall that the energy of individual d's in the cluster are a fraction of the total energy for the cluster, which were made up of 10s to 100s of D2O molecules.) These observations of Beuhler et al. caused some difficulties, because existing models of hot fusion could not account for the rates of fusion that they were seeing. Nonetheless there are people who will say with great confidence that this is just hot fusion and, therefore, it is not interesting. This assertion may be correct, and it may be incorrect. It is quite possible and perhaps even likely that Beuhler et al.'s findings fall into the category of hot fusion, that they are not something novel, and that they are not at any rate due to LENR. My point here is only that they *might* be interesting and that they *might* be due to LENR. Without an adequate theory to link together all of the different pieces of the puzzle into a clean conceptual model, we are somewhat at a loss to say what is hot fusion and what is LENR. We can describe the situation in broad terms -- what you see in a nuclear reactor is fission. What you see in a hydrogen bomb is hot fusion and fission. And what you see going on in the sun is hot fusion and probably does not include LENR (although on this point I sometimes wonder). And also, on the other side -- what you see in the F&P effect is LENR. And what we're seeing with Rossi's and Defkalion's devices give every reason to think that it is LENR. And when you have LENR going on, you do not see prompt radiation at any levels commensurate with the heat that is evolved. But, sometimes in LENR experiments, you see fast particles at very low levels. And sometimes you do see neutrons at very low levels. And sometimes you see other things. And sometimes what is seen may not be readily explicable by existing models of hot fusion. It is an act of pure volition, and not of one of logical or scientific reasoning, to push such observations into the corner of hot fusion. People do it because they want to do it, because they have a heuristic that they like for deciding a priori what is LENR, and not because we understand sufficiently what is going on to say that these things are just hot fusion. It is a similar act of pure volition to say that complex structures in a metal lattice are a requirement for LENR. What we can conclude is that complex structures in a metal lattice seem to make LENR possible. But that is different than saying that LENR requires such an environment -- that's a much harder proposition to support. You must go around and find all of the other environments in the universe, and then show how LENR cannot occur in them. Absent a suitable and compelling theory, we're out of our depth trying to draw such a conclusion. It would be similar to asserting that LENR requires electrolysis, deuterium and palladium. We know that LENR seems to arise in such an environment given the right conditions. But if we hewed to that observation as final truth, we would have to exclude the possibility of LENR occurring in NiH, which would obviously be a silly thing to do. About the GeV levels of energy in the lightning discharge -- note that neutrons are also seen in arc discharges at much smaller energies, so the GeV and MeV levels of energy may not be pertinent to the neutron bursts observed by the Russian group. About the 10 MeV neutrons, note that such neutrons are going to be the *product* of some reaction, and the kinetic energy of the neutrons will be a function of the resulting mass deficit and not the initial energy of the reactants. Eric
