On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
Good question. We put boron just for safety, as Prof. Focardi teached to
> me. Kind of just in case…
I'm going to guess that they have boron to shield from spallation neutrons
resulting from this reaction:
p + d → 2p + n
This would be an anticipated side channel if there are fast protons flying
out from the surface of the substrate. The number of these reactions would
be a function of the relative fraction of deuterium to hydrogen in the gas
and of the cross section for this reaction at the typical energy of a fast
proton that has been partly stopped through elastic collisions with other
protons. There's a chance the rate for this reaction would be fairly low.
The neutrons would either decay through electron emission or be captured
by and activate larger atoms in the environment.
If the overall heat effect is occurring through deuteron stripping with
lattice sites, as has been suggested elsewhere, such spallations would take
away some of the deuterium fuel.
Eric
(Note that the original responses from Rossi do not have bold font.)
