The decay of the neutron must be instansious because no indications of neutron absorption into a deuterium nucleus to produce tritium. There is no indication that any atom larger in mass than deuterium had been generated.
You must assume instansious completion of the reaction exclusive of any side reactions. On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 11:54 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote: > > The claim I will egregiously ignore for the moment as either being >> artifact or something that is different from what we currently understand >> it to be is the idea that there were twice as many gas molecules after the >> experiment had run than at the time it had started. >> > > I think I found a way out of this difficulty. There might be a > straightforward way to explain the increase in the number of gas molecules > after the runs by Yoshida et al. If we're seeing neutron capture after a > deuteron has been forced to approach a nickel lattice site, with a > corresponding expelling of a 5-7 MeV proton, we can expect there to be a > lot of spallation. Here is an image of what I have in mind: > > http://i.imgur.com/cATIdcT.png > > The idea is that the current from an arc between two grains is causing > great downward pressure on deuteron ions, forcing them into a recess in one > of the grains. (They're ionized because they're in the midst of an > electric arc.) That pressure forces a deuteron at the bottom of the recess > to approach close to one of the lattice sites. At some point the > Oppenheimer-Phillips process takes over and strips the neutron from the > deuteron, yielding a high-energy proton. While the lattice site barely > moves, the proton flies with great force into the ions above it. As > happens when a bullet is fired into water or sand, the momentum of the > proton is quickly dampened. In the process you can expect a spallation, in > which some of the other deuterons are broken apart into protons and > neutrons. The neutrons will have a half-life of 14 minutes and will decay > into protons. Outside of the electric arc the protons will combine to form > some multiple of H2 molecules of the original number of D2/DH molecules > that were fed into the system. Since the high-energy proton is colliding > primarily with other ionized protons and deuterons, I'm guessing there will > be little high-energy Bremsstrahlung from collisions with lattice site > electrons. > > Presumably all of this happens before a dislocation occurs at the bottom > of the recess and relieves some of the pressure. > > Eric > >
