In reply to Eric Walker's message of Mon, 2 Dec 2013 20:17:00 -0800: Hi, [snip]
A typical delay time for the emission of a gamma ray is about 1E-17 seconds. Light will travel about 30 angstrom in that time. A sphere with that radius would encompass about 4000 atoms. That means that there are about 4000 atoms worth of electrons that are close enough to absorb the energy before a gamma ray is emitted. In a hot plasma the inter atomic distances are much larger, as the density of the gas is much lower than the density of a solid. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? However consider the fact that gamma emitting radioisotopes are common, even in solids, so apparently the coupling mechanism that might allow the energy to be transferred to the neighbouring electrons is missing. :( >On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 11:56 PM, P.J van Noorden <[email protected]>wrote: > > Now comes the big question. Are there any new nuclear reactions possible >> which produce for instance 4He without particles or gamma emission? >> > >I'm thinking we've made the missing gamma problem harder than it needs to >be. My guess -- there's genuine d+d and p+d fusion going on (as well as >the occasional transmutation), and when a fusion happens, instead of the >usual, slow gamma emission, there's a near-instantaneous transfer of >electrostatic energy to the nearby electron cloud in the host metal. If >this is what happens, the energy of the short-lived unstable daughter can >be expected to be divided between a large number of surrounding electrons, >giving rise to a bath of lower-energy photons rather than a single >high-energy gamma photon, together with a near motionless stable daughter. > >Eric Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
