On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 2:29 PM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
I am asking these questions in an attempt to determine the quantum step > energy levels associated with spin coupling. When I think of nuclear spin coupling, I think of a nucleus with different energy levels. Each level has a unique set of quantum numbers, including an angular momentum and a parity. There is a ground state, e.g., an angular momentum of 0 and a parity of +. Sometimes the ground state has an angular momentum different than 0+, e.g., 2+ or 1/2-. When the nucleus is excited to a different energy level, it's like pumping water up into a cistern. The water now has potential energy which, if a valve is opened, will be transformed into the kinetic energy of the water flowing downhill. The energy of the different nuclear excited states is often in the range of keV to MeV. So you can excite a nucleus to a higher energy level, and when it relaxes (often quite quickly, but sometimes it takes a bit of time), and a photon with energy equal to the difference in levels will be emitted -- e.g., a 193 keV gamma photon or a 1.7 MeV gamma photon. The transition, and therefore the photon energy, may not be directly to ground, and there may be a cascade of transitions as the nucleus relaxes. In this understanding, there is a transition from kinetic to potential energy and then from potential energy back to kinetic energy again, as the nucleus accepts energy (transitions to an excited state) and then emits it again (relaxes). Each transition will have its own half-life, but the half-lives are typically extremely short. In my limited understanding, in order for some kind of spin coupling to work as a means of fractionating the energy of a large gamma transition in a nearby compound nucleus following upon a fusion, I think the observer nucleus would need to relax only via transitions that are not far apart from one another, e.g., in the keV range rather than MeV range, in order to be consistent with the lack of gammas seen in LENR experiments. Sometimes a nucleus will have a large number of energy levels that are very close to one another, and in the relaxing of the excited state, there will be a series of photons emitted which do not go directly to ground. But all of this seems to leave a lot to chance, because a non-negligible portion of the time the nucleus will transition directly to ground, and thereby re-emitting a large photon. Sometimes a transition to ground will be forbidden; this is a detail that will depend upon the specific isotope, e.g., of nickel. Eric
