To Eric's discussion of downconversion ... When you speak of the plasma fusion output channels, I like to think of it in a Bohr-sian way. Presuming plasma, you have isolated deuterium nuclei, with each nucleus spinning around random vectors. When a pair approaches with a trajectory alignment that the collision will result in fusion, the relative rotation between the nuclei is still random. The strong force is like fly paper - it is so short range (fraction of a nucleon diameter), you have to essentially "touch" before sticking. So you end up with 3 possibilities of this close approach: 1) proton is closest and hits and sticks first, 2) neutron is closest and hits and sticks first, and 3) the proton and neutron hit just right so that they both hit at the same time and stick in an interlocking fashion. When 1) happens, a neutron is released and you get 3He. When 2 happens, a proton is released and you get tritium, and when 3) happens you get 4He and a gamma. This would predict that 1) and 2) would be fairly common and 3) would be very rare. However, because of the Coulomb field, as the deuterium nuclei approach each other, it would push the protons apart, making the neutrons more likely to face each other, but this only happens at the last minute. Because of this, 2) may be slightly more favored. I don't like to think of this plasma fusion as a black box wherein two nuclei collide and through some magic this set of statistical outcomes emerges. Once you start thinking about why these channels emerge, you can begin to think about why LENR leads to its own output channels.
Downshifting reminds me of subharmonic conversion since I come from an EE background. You cannot get subharmonic conversion without coupling to a very strong nonlinearity. Even then, the output resonance must be harmonically matched to the input frequency for any kind of efficiency. When everything is tuned up perfectly, and with a very strong nonlinearity, you get fairly efficient conversion, but that may mean 20-40%. One of the things about Hagelstein's proposition that bothers me is that the excited nucleus does not want to stay excited for very long - it decays in an incredibly short time. Suppose you are de-exciting a dd* that wants to release 24 MeV of energy with a set of phonons at 10THz. The frequency difference is 24MeV=5.8e21Hz compared to 10THz=1E13Hz or a ratio of 5.8E8. If you are taking the energy away with a 5.8E8x lower frequency phonon, it seems like it would take 5.8E8x as long to extract the energy. Can an excited nucleus be coerced into waiting to burp that long? It seems like it would require extreme coupling between the excited nucleus and the lattice for that to happen - much more coupling than the exchange coupling of the electronic lattice can provide. Axil has been talking about interacting waves ... My EE training also tells me that waves are 2 ships that cross in the night and neither knows that the other is there and neither affects the other UNLESS there is the presence of a nonlinear medium that they both traverse simultaneously. I am not saying that the vacuum is perfectly linear, but by most of our experience in the macro world, the vacuum is nearly perfectly linear; otherwise radio would not work as we know it. As we get to nuclear scales, this may be different. Also note that solitons are solutions to a nonlinear equation - it seems that the nonlinearity must be present for solitons to propagate. If it is the case that the "wave" nature of elementary particles is more soliton-like, it may be indicating that the vacuum is not linear at the scales of elementary particles. Once the nonlinearity is invoked at that scale, there may be wave-to-wave coupling. Bob Higgins
