Chemical and nuclear catalysis driven by localized anharmonic vibrations -- V.I. Dubinko, D.V. Laptev
ABSTRACT: In many-body nonlinear systems with sufficient anharmonicity, a special kind of lattice
vibrations, namely, Localized Anharmonic Vibrations (LAV) can be excited either thermally or by
external triggering, in which the amplitude of atomic oscillations greatly exceeds that of harmonic
oscillations (phonons) that determine the system temperature. Coherency and persistence of LAV may
have drastic effect on chemical and nuclear reaction rates due to time-periodic modulation of reaction
sites. One example is a strong acceleration of chemical reaction rates driven by thermally-activated
"jumps" over the reaction barrier due to the time-periodic modulation of the barrier height in the LAV
vicinity. At sufficiently low temperatures, the reaction rate is controlled by quantum tunneling through
the barrier rather than by classical jumping over it. A giant increase of sub-barrier transparency was
demonstrated for a parabolic potential well with the time-periodic eigenfrequency, when the modulation
frequency exceeds the eigenfrequency by a factor of ~2 (parametric regime). Such regime can be
realized for a hydrogen or deuterium atom in metal hydrides/deuterides, such as NiH or PdD, in the
vicinity of LAV. We present an analytical solution of the Schrodinger equation for a nonstationary harmonic
oscillator, analyze the parametric regime in details and discuss its applications to the tunnel effect and to
D-D fusion in PdD lattice. We obtain simple analytical expressions for the increase of amplitude and energy
of zero-point oscillations (ZPO) induced by the parametric modulation. Based on that, we demonstrate a
drastic increase of the D-D fusion rate with in-creasing number of modulation periods evaluated in the
framework of Schwinger model, which takes into account suppression of the Coulomb barrier due to lattice
vibrations.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02277