An interesting paper just appeared on Arxiv.org entitled - "Understanding Branly's effect through Induced Tunnelling" arxiv.org/abs/1312.7464
The Branly effect occurs when a small electromagnetic wave induces a very large current flow in granular medium of metallic microparticles. It is very sensitive to the grain-grain separation, the grain surface and to phase and amplitude of the excitation wave. An extremely "finicky" phenomenon. Several similarities to some LENR experiments are apparent. So I googled the string "Branly fusion OR LENR" - and found that someone had already noticed the parallels. See the posting at - "Thread: Cold Fusion and Branly effect" www.thescienceforum.com/physics/19671-cold-fusion-branly-effect.html The Branly effect could explain low-energy tunneling effects when the particle pairs involved receive a properly timed e-m momentum kick while in a common collective phase of oscillation. It may complement, rather than contradict, some current theories. If anyone is interested, the abstract and an extract from the above paper are below, along with related references. Comments are welcome. -- Lou Pagnucco ABSTRACT: At the end of the nineteenth century Edouard Branly discovered that the electrical resistance of a granular metallic conductor could drop by several orders of magnitude when excited by the electromagnetic field emitted by a distant electrical spark. Despite the fact that this effect was used to detect radio waves in the early days of wireless telegraphy and more recently, studied in the field of granular materials, no satisfactory explanation of the physical origin of the effect has been proposed. In this contribution, we relate the Branly effect to the induced tunnelling effect first described by Francois Bardou and Dominique Boose. EXTRACT: "In a work published in 2001, Bardou and Boose established theoretically that the probability of a particle tunnelling through a barrier of potential could be increased significantly by gently striking the particle at the time when the centroid of its wave packet is reflecting on the barrier... These authors have shown that the excitation of the particle at the time of its reflection on a barrier of potential increases it transmission probability by several orders of magnitude." Related - "Understanding the Branly effect" http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0703495 "A quantum evaporation effect" - Bardou, Boose http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0103095 ABSTRACT: A small momentum transfer to a particle interacting with a steep potential barrier gives rise to a quantum evaporation effect which increases the transmission appreciably. This effect results from the unexpectedly large population of quantum states with energies above the height of the barrier. Its characteristic properties are studied and an example of physical system in which it may be observed is given.
