On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/docs/20121204Kullander-Ni-Isotopes-LIG1204121.pdf > It is not the one from Kullander that I am looking for but it mentions > some of the same details. I see that this analysis was carried out in 2012. If you find one that is for the first TRP, that would be nice. The analysis is interesting. It took a little bit of squinting and thinking to see what the charts mean. The analysis was done by two people at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, using two nickel isotopic standards, one from NIST and one from Alfa Aesar. They looked at the isotopic composition of nickel used in a 2012 version of Rossi's E-Cat, for samples before and after use. They made significant adjustments to their numbers to compensate for various sources of possible error. Thankfully they included error bars, so that you can get a sense of the strength of any potential correlations in the isotopic ratios. They conclude that the ratios of the isotopes found in the samples are consistent with the natural ones from the nickel isotope standards. We are not told anything about the circumstances of the nickel that was provided by Rossi; we do not even know if excess heat was seen. In light of Rossi's demonstrated desire to keep the ingredients a secret, it is as plausible that no excess was seen as it is that the nickel was accompanied by excess heat, or even that the nickel is just some from some stock that he had on hand. For different ratios of nickel isotopes, the charts show the ratio of a given sample with that of the NIST standard, with the NIST standard at the y=0 line (i.e., the charts show a ratio of two ratios). The authors have taken a value that is close to 1, subtracted 1 from it and multiplied by 1000, presumably to magnify the difference. A value of 0 means the sample isotope ratio is identical to the NIST standard (e.g., 61Ni/58Ni). A value of 0.4 means that the isotope in the denominator of the non-NIST sample ratio was slightly higher than that in the NIST sample. The charts show no discernable patterns for 60Ni/58Ni and 62/58Ni. The 64Ni/62Ni chart and the 61Ni/58Ni chart show a systematic difference both between the NIST and the Alfa Aesar standards and between the Alfa Aesar standard and the ratio from Rossi's samples. The Alfa Aesar samples in these two instances are linear in the NIST ratio, but above it by a factor. This suggests to me that there was an overcompensation by the authors that ended up differentiating the NIST and Alfa Aesar samples more than it should have. This gives me a little more hope than the authors that these two charts might be showing something. If they show anything, they show that there is more 61Ni and 64Ni in the Alfa Aesar and NIST standards than in Rossi's mixture at the time of the analysis. Apart from noise in measurements, such a discrepancy might be due to natural variation in the isotopic composition of nickel; to a reaction eating away some of the 61Ni and 64Ni; or to Rossi's using a preparation that is somehow depleted in these specific isotopes. One thought here is that 64Ni, in particular, has a beta- decay after neutron capture as well as an excited state after inelastic collision that leads to a 63 keV photon that would pass through even lead shielding. Given that the ratios for Rossi's "before" and "after" samples are not greatly different, if there is some kind of reacting away of these two isotopes, it would be very minor, leading one to suppose that the pattern being seen goes back back to the original preparation rather than a reaction of some kind. Eric
