On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote:
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. > Yes -- your feeling about phonons is similar to mine (and, for me, spin coupling, too). The problem largely feels like a bandwidth/latency optimization problem. The compound nucleus is optimizing for the fastest, highest throughput decay. So it has different options (observed and hypothesized): - gamma emission -- high latency, high throughput - kinetic disintegration (to 3He, t, etc.) -- medium latency, high throughput - coupling with phonon modes -- low latency, low throughput? - spin coupling -- low latency, low throughput? - electromagnetic impulse (EMP) -- low latency, high throughput? (When seen in the above light, the optimized solution seems to me to be EMP, assuming the different channels have been properly characterized.) Eric
