This post attempts to justify the statement as follows:
“LENR is a catalytic process.”
To understand LENR we must first understand how a catalyst works. A catalyst is like adding a bit of magic to a chemical reaction. These reactions need a certain amount of energy in order to happen. If they don't have it, oh well, the reaction probably can't happen. A catalyst lowers the amount of energy needed on the average so that a reaction can happen more easily. A catalyst is all about energy. A catalyst gathers together, amplifies, and focuses the ambient energy in the environment so that a chemical reaction can happen more easily.
The energy needed to make a reaction happen is called the activation energy. As everything moves around, energy is needed. The energy that a reaction needs is usually in the form of heat.
There is also something called an inhibitor that works in exactly the opposite way as catalysts. Inhibitors slow the rate of reaction. Sometimes they even stop the reaction completely. You might be asking, "Why would anyone need those?" You could use an inhibitor to make the reaction slower and more controllable. Without inhibitors, some reactions could keep going and going and going. If they did, all of the molecules would be used up. That would be bad if those reactions are not wanted. An inhibitor must work in a way that is opposite to a catalyst. They must spread out, weaken, and defocus the ambient energy available to the reaction.
It looks like catalytic action involves the management and control of heat. Heat is a form of electromagnetism commonly called light.
The question that now arises: “how can we control heat in a chemical reaction”?
The area of catalytic control that most interests the study of LENR is nanoparticle control of a chemical reaction (1).
Nanoparticles of palladium, iridium, platinum, iron, nickel, titanium… have all shown the capacity to control heat to speed up chemical reactions. In LENR we are interested in how these nanoparticles control heat and then understand how this control can be amplified to move the catalytic process out of the range of the chemical reaction into the range of the subatomic reactions.
Section 2: Controlling LENR through the proper use of micro-particles
Micro-particles provide the ability for the amplification of the catalytic effect through the application of many forms of resonances. One such amplification mechanism involves the reception of heat energy by the metal particle as it acts as an antenna which reaches out over a great distance to bring in heat energy from a very long distance away from the particle. All that heat energy is converted into dipole electron motion. But now we must understand what the Nuclear Active Environment (NAE) is, it is useful to know how to build the NAE.
How to build a nano-cavity
To illustrate a pivotal principle from Nano-engineering that bears upon LENR, in experimental results from that field involving Nanoplasmonics, the electromagnetic field strength in the spaces between nanoparticles is exponentially strengthened based on the number of nanoparticles in contact with each other.
In more detail, heat is converted into electromagnetism through the action of dipole motion on the surface of the metal particles. This dipole motion produces an alternating current that is tightly confined to the skin of the metal particle.
Dipole vibration generates a positively charged side of the metal particle and a negatively charged side. Heat induces an electrostatic charge on the surface of the metal particle through the action of coherent alternating currents of the free electron gas that live on the surface of metals.
A strange thing happens to the electrons on the negative side of these metal particles. The electron becomes entangled with the photons of heat when the energy level of the electrons and photons of heat become equal. A compound waveform is produced called a polariton(2).
Because the polariton is mostly light, it is a boson, there is no limit to the number of these quasiparticles (the electron half of the dipole combined with light) that can be packed into the NAE. The other positive “hole” part of the dipole resides within the walls of the NAE.
This coupling of the electron gas with the infrared EMF is the first and most basic level of resonance in the LENR reaction.
One very important way to increase the strength of the LENR reaction is to increase the density of the electron gas that floats around on the surface of the metal particle.
Amplification in the density of the electron gas will amplify the LENR reaction. In the same way, a big capacitor will produce a bigger spark than a very small capacitor.
Needless to say, enhancing heat production is the other method that increases the strength of the LENR reaction, but in Nanoplasmonics, heat and the density (like amperage) and energy levels (like voltage) of the electron gas are directly connected.
I am interested in the system that uses micro-particles for the lattice because this type of system provides additional opportunities for resonance development to increase reaction intensity by increasing the density and energy of the electron gas.
This amplification process through the use of micro-particles is the subject of the next section of this description.
Remember, strengthening the density of the polariton gas is a prime LENR design goal. Electromagnetic field strength amplification is what we really want to do.
Particle aggregation is a polariton amplification mechanism.
Micro and nano sized particles will come together and aggregate under electrostatic attraction. Large particles will pass on their compliment of polaritons down to its smaller particles in the aggregate. It has recently been discovered that this transfer of polaritons is a one way operation. The nano engineers call this one way traveling polariton the topolariton.
The flow of topolaritons go from the large particles to the very smallest particles where they become captured in the gaps between the very smallest particles.
Because the topolaritons are bosons, there is no limit to how many can be packed into the nanoscale cavities between nanoparticles. These waveforms travel in a circle and form a soliton as a result of whispering gallery wave confinement and self-interference.
The point is that EMF can be collected, concentrated, and focused to such a huge extent by many and varied nanoparticle based mechanisms that the catalytic process can advance from the realm of chemistry to the realm of quantum mechanical driven sub atomic particles effects. These effects can amplify EMF by a factor of many trillions of times or 10^^20 to equal or surpass the power of the most powerful lasers.
These NAE like other catalysts are not consumed like neutrons but keep producing disruptive subatomic particle effects for many days after they are formed and fully loaded with EMF energy. These solitons can hold up to 1,000,000 GeV of power.
The pictures below are found in 4.
I
Figure A - Optical enhancement of nanoparticle clusters with coordination numbers (points of near contact or nano-gaps) from 1 to 7.
Comparison between the enhancement factors obtained for each sample, normalized to the enhancement produced by a single particle excited with a 633 nm laser line.
Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) spectra of benzenethiol on the pentagonal bipyramid (CN 7).
The enhancement factor of the electromagnetic fields in the nano-gaps is proportional to the capacitance that the particle can impose on the dielectric material in the gap.
Simply put, the number of topolaritons that can be packed into the dielectric medium filling the gap is directly proportional to the amount of charge difference that the particles can bring to bear in the immediate neighborhood of the nano-cavity.
The micro-particle has a far greater capacitive potential than a single nano-particle or even a large cluster of nano-particles because its bulk and surface area is orders of magnitude bigger than those particles that are sized on the nanoscale. But critically, there needs to be a way to increase both the effective surface area of the micro-particle and the coordination number (nano-gaps) when two micro-particles grow close together.
This is cleverly engineered by covering the micro-particles with nanowires like the spines that cover the surface skin like a sea urchin.
The nanowires draw close and touch as the micro-particles draw together but the charge on the surface of the micro-particle largely remains in place because current does not readily flow accoss these filamentary points of contact. The nanowires provide a gage or better described as a spacing mechanism so that the micro-particles maintain the optimum nano-metric capacitive distance between their respective micro-particle surfaces.
1 - Nanomaterial-based catalyst From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwinn-_gk6_JAhXErD4KHVmmDQMQFggjMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNanomaterial-based_catalyst&usg=AFQjCNEYo34SnwAoYYIxUKzfP3uw3qPtiA&sig2=lLMhy0l8CfDv5EscX_vcBQ
2 – Semiconductor exciton polaritons
3 – The Topolariton, a New Half-Matter, Half-Light Particle http://www.caltech.edu/news/to…half-light-particle-48222
4 – Organized Plasmonic Clusters with High Coordination Number and Extraordinary Enhancement in Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3556689/
5 – Whispering-gallery waves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispering-gallery_wave