11th Cold Fusion conference in Marseille

[mcg]

Re tunneling. Here is a short paper by Steven Koonin on the calculated rate. It was published in Nature in June, 1989. It was probably written in May.

It is interesting to read into papers on CF from this period because most people were still reserving judgement, and basically trying to figure out what was going on. By the end of that summer, opinion had hardened up on both sides, and the freewheeling "what if" speculation disappeared from the literature. Anyway, Koonin's calculation showed a reaction rate of 3 X 10^(-64) per second. It interested me that he got a much better result for p+d.




.

[badflash]

It doesn't matter what the method of fusion is, be it tunneling, hot fusion, etc. 2 dueterium atoms weigh more than 1 helium atom. Put the two together and the mass must go someplace. Unless this makes a new chargeless particle, it either doesn't happen, or is in the realm of magic.

[mcg]

I think Koonin's point was that tunneling was pretty unlikely.

As to the reasonable question of where the energy goes, the notion seems to be that it goes "into the lattice," a theory espoused by several people over the years, but chiefly and perhaps most effectively by Peter Hagelstein at MIT.

Here is a link to an article that touches on the subject.

http://www.wsoctv.com/technology/3037068/detail.html

The neutronless d+d => He-4 + gamma-but-where-is-the- gamma pathway is a frequenltly recurring theme and fascination in the CF community and it has been for some years -- it is not a novelty.

I think the fixation on that particular reaction is probably a long road to a dead end, but I also think it is best to remain agnostic until the sytem is better understood. There are in fact nuclear reaction products in the CF apparatus. Tritium, Helium-3, Helium-4. They got there, somehow.

[badflash]

I have no problem with the energy going into the lattice vs. as a photon. What I was trying to say is that around 17 mev MUST be accounted for in each reaction through mass or energy, no matter how the reaction takes place. The supposition that tunneling or some other low energy method would release less net energy would require a trip to an alternate universe. That was one of the ideas in "food of the gods" by Asimov, but I think such a proposal would require a different forum...

[Hector]

Silly question, but is there any evidence that demonstrates that gammas are being produced in CF reactions that give rise to He4?

The reason I ask is that if you don’t have neutrons like normal fusion than maybe there are no gammas either.

[mcg]

Jack, you are right. No question.

Tunneling through the Coulomb barrier was often urged in the spring of 1989 as a reasonable way to account for the (apparently) drastically reduced energy input requirement for deuterium fusion in the Pons-Fleishmann cell. At the time, most people were still willing to mentally experiment with the idea that d+d was in fact occurring in the CF cell.

(If tunneling is or was thought to somehow affect the output side of the ledger, I guess I missed this.)

But after the Koonin paper, the possibility of tunneling looked very remote. It began to appear that maybe there would be no way at all to fit the Pons Fleishmann result into conventional physics. In private conversations you began to hear undertones of suspicion and deep uneasiness.

About then, bonk, The New York Times published a front page photo of Pons and Fleishmann standing at their lab bench. Their apparatus was immersed in a plastic water bath. It looked like a washtub purchased at Target; Lettered with a wax pencil on the side of this washtub was the facetious label: “The U-1 Tokamak.” The “U” was for Utah.

I really think that photo in the Times did them in. Fifteen years later, we are still trying to sort through the bits & pieces.

You can’t help but notice the progress of concatenation in this science. We started with d+d. In the last few years, d+d+d, for which there is a really attractive rationale, captured a lot of attention. I did not go to Marseilles but I gather, from this thread, that someone has now presented d+d+d+d.

Maybe there is a trend here. But it seems to me there must be more plausible (and less obsessional) reaction systems to look at than these supernumerary fusions of deuterons. The lithium sixes and sevens in the cell might be up to something, for examples.

Best wishes for the Thanksgiving holiday

Michael

[walter_b_marvin]

re: mass

True the mass has to go someplace..... But if one one or two of these happen per second in a gram of material, it might have well as not hvae happened at all

[badflash]

Few, if any neutrons, few if any gammas are seen in cold fusion. There is helium and heat. With the amount of heat being reported, everyone in the lab would be dead if this were conventional fusion.

The reason some are figuring D+D+D+D is the conservation laws. This is sort of like why they came up with the carbon cycle on solar fusion to go from four hydrogen atoms to one helium. 4 deuts would form Be8 which would immediately fision into 2 He4's and no gamma. Li6+D would cause the same thing, so either could work.

I think the carbon cycle is pretty silly as it does not explain 1st generation stars that have no carbon.

[Richard Hull]

All of you folks have provide insightful and thoughtful responses. The CF/CANR/LENR community has gone over all of this many times in the many years. Lots of ideas, but no real significant neutron counts (thank god) and no real gamma counts either. Yet the transformations are confirmed by many teams. It is true that the components are in tens of parts per billion and in micro layers of surface material only. There is talk of a dielectric interface phenomena and about a million other shots in the dark. The issue is wide open and a lot of folks are working on it, but on either a self funded basis or on very limited laboratory budgets.

There is too much interesting science here to just be cast off.

I haven't heard much regarding the sono-fusion aspect that hit the journals a couple of years ago. The initial paper was poo-poo'd as the neutron measurement results of the orginal authors was called into question in a counter paper. Then a second high quality run was done by one of the original authors who teamed up with a neutron metrologist, which still showed neutrons over the background. Here the matter has rested so far as I can tell.

This is often the way in the world of bleeding edge science. If there is no cash payoff readily seen, you can forget decent funding. New and interesting science is not the business of business or venture capital..........It is in expectation of a payday.

Richard Hull

[3l]

Hi Gang:

So far all the methods are duds.
The tunneling method is so old it has moss on it.
What is neglected whenever I heard this theory is a lack of enough deuteron numbers to get the statistical yield they needed for power fusion. In a matrix all tunneling goes out the window because how do you do a mixed well equation? Murrey Gellman tried and failed. Feinman gave it a crack and put it down. Without the probability in hand it is a futile effort....period. EOS
The neutron target stuff gives good yield but a power source ?!
Not Likely!

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[walter_b_marvin]

Wouldn't be the first time somthing intuitive is mathametically intractable

[TBenson]

Just as a note...

In my experience there hasn't been much focus on tunneling as the mechanism for CF, in years. The 2 most vocal theorists are Scott Chubb and Peter Hagelstein. Their theories seem closest to experimental results (when I say "close" of course that means, within light-years, because nobody is really close yet).

Both theories work with resonance and/or coherance. The idea is that, when you pack large numbers of deuterons into a metallic crystal, those deuterons lose their electrons and become...essentially...a fluid that can move about in the material. This is well-known...D ions in palladium act like electrons in copper. They pool and flow.

If the temperature is low and the crystal size is very small (nanometers) then they can form a coherent state. Think Bose Einstein Condensate. They become a single huge wave function that in some ways reacts as a whole.

If there is, let's say, a million atoms in this coherent form, then the colombe barrier can be overcome. Here is my very imperfect mental image: a million Ds "slosh" to one side and encounter a barrier (the edge of the crystal or some less permeable material). The mass of the million momentarily presses down on a pair of Ds at the edge of the pool. That overcomes the barrier for that pair and they fuse.

When this happens, because of the nature of Ds in this state, the D+D = H4 pathway is vastly preferred. I don't understand why, but it's been explained to me that the mathematics shows this. The same math shows that the energy will not be spit out as a gamma ray, as in a D+D in vacuum reaction, but instead the energy will be spread across the entire million-atom mass, and therefore passed to the surrounding matrix.

As for the D+D+D+D reactions, nobody is really sure about them. If they happen, it would be some variation of the above scenerio. Same goes for the D+D+Mo and other reactions that people appear to see, where the host metal matrix is transmuted UP a few atomic weights. The idea is, when you have a million-D coherent fluid, it is able to overcome the colombe barrier in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

That's my very primitive and incomplete understanding of the current state of CF theory. Please correct any parts of it that are misleading.

Finally, I'd like to point something out. The reaction described above can exist in nature and we'd never see it. It might be occuring, right now, in every ion-beam experiment in every nuclear science department in the world, and in every fusor every built, and we'd never see it. The rates of H4 production are far too small to be caught and there is no ionizing radiation to create a detectable signature. It's invisible. The only clue would be a very miniscule amount of excess heat that would show up in every experiment. But nobody looks for such heat.

This is why I have kept involved in CF. It looks to me like the ONE place in the nuclear world where there MIGHT be something unexpected, that would have been "missed' in the past century of work.

There are some other fun questions. For example, if this type of very low-level trace nuclear reaction does occur in nature, where would it occur? Maybe in metals in the heart of planets? So, where does the heat come from that shines out from Jupiter, and that powers the core of Earth?

Is such a reaction does occur, and it tends to create heavier and heavier atomic nuclei (it's a random fusion reaction that sometimes involves heavier matrix nuclei) then could we speculate that heavy elements are being created all the time, in the cores of planets? Would that be another way to explain the heavy elements in the universe, instead of the SuperNova theory?

This is all rank speculation. But that's whay makes it fun.

[Richard Hull]

Thanks for the thoughs Tom. You and I are not far appart on CF. The big players like the Chubbs and Hagelstein have a lot of time invested on the issue and superlative backgrounds to do the theoretical work. I am about 78% sure there is something real going on here. I think it lies inbetween the world of chemistry and nuclear physics. I always felt that there was too big a gulf between the two. There is a natural gulf needed, of course, as we observe no readily obvious linkage in casual investigations. The history of unusual results in this area can be traced in scientific papers back to the early 20th century. Like most papers, they just were ignored, when published.

This is nobody's fault, it is just the way of the world. It usually works out that once something is clearly seen and presented, a tortured paper trail of related and "hinted at" papers can be researched and belched up from the literature.

Richard Hull