You make it more difficult than necessary - nuclear physics is exceedingly easy.
It is really very simple: All charged heavy particles moving with MeV energies cause CE in even-even nuclei and in most other nuclides. You just need an E2 component in a transition from the ground state. And you don't need to pass the Coulomb barrier! The excited state will decay with gamma.
Would that it were really so! Once we step through the elegant picture of nuclear physics presented by the mathematical models, there's no doubt a swarming buzz of contradictory data saying all kinds of crazy things which must be tackled statistically. We should try to keep things simple, but not simplistic.
Beta electrons, and Auger electrons arising from electron capture, are not heavy charged particles. I'll gently nudge you again -- can you think of any reason a priori that would exclude these processes from occurring, in the same manner of the CE objection with regard to energetic alphas? We can acknowledge the following difficulties up front, so hopefully they won't be a distraction: there are few positrons of which I am aware in LENR experiments, as might be expected as a competing channel for electron capture, and there is little in the way of de-excitation gammas following upon relaxation of excited levels after beta decay. Are there any other experimental reasons (in contrast to theoretical ones) to exclude beta decay and electron capture?
As an aside, I'm curious if your understanding is that there is only a single channel for the relaxation of Coulomb excitation. What if something analogous to internal conversion were the norm and happening much more often than previously thought, and gammas are just a rare channel that is easy to detect?
About the uranium paper. The results are sensational and will give a Nobel prize if correct. It would need independent confirmation. I do not think that will happen. Changing half lives in nuclear physics has been looked for many times without luck. It would of course be nice in we could shorten the half lives of trans-uranium elements.
Non-serious question: why is the Dash study not an independent confirmation of the claims in the 1991 Barker patent? Are Dash et al. the wrong scientists to do independent confirmations? More serious question: have you read any specific studies that failed to change half-lives, or are you passing along a generalization you've encountered in the course of your career?
I don't see how shortening the half lives of elements helps. Sure, the end products should be stable-ish, but the massive increase in radioactivity caused by "speeding up decay" sounds rather nasty and a route for atomic bomb makers to salivate over.
This is an interesting point. My first thought is that there's no guarantee that shortening half-lives helps anything or will be useful. Perhaps doing that is useless, or dangerous, or opens up a pandora's box. As a matter of basic science, perhaps you'll agree that it would be interesting to investigate nonetheless.
If you recall the earlier discussion on the distinction between "decay" and "induced reactions," maybe it's not really the case that the half-lives of uranium isotopes are being shortened. Perhaps the branching ratios are changing as well, e.g., towards aneutronic decay modes. Coming from another angle, if the half-lives of uranium can be shorted, maybe they can be shortened in other, lighter isotopes whose decay profile is less difficult to work with, leading to usable quantities of heat, some helium, and perhaps even electricity.
I don't understand what you are saying there, Eric. I assume you are talking of strictly Ni-H systems. It appears few of the recent efforts qualify as strictly that. Instead we are seeing a lot of lithium present. Surely Li-7 is not "an alpha emitter", but its proton adduct Be-8 is solely that. I mentioned recently the parallels between the Lipinsky Li + p system and these thermal "Ni-H" with lithium devices such as you are discussing. Peter Eckstrom is pointing out, it appears, that high MeV alphas are not [likely] present in those systems, otherwise we would be seeing neutrons and gammas... if I am reading his point correctly.
Sorry about that, Longview. I was thinking within my own mental framework. Yes, there's also the possibility of p+7Li → 8Be* → 2 * 4He that some people are considering. I've given up on that line of thought for anything more than a side channel at the moment, as it's not clear to me what would accelerate the protons sufficiently to overcome the Coulomb barrier, and I don't find the collective LENR models very promising. But that's just a personal assessment.
Peter is saying that if there were MeV alphas in a NiH system with lithium, you'd get gamma emission from the excitation and then relaxation of lithium and nickel through inelastic collisions from the alpha particles. Presumably that gamma emission would be directly proportional to the amount of heat that is generated.
Kindly bring us up to speed on your conclusions. It will help the field, it will advance the work, it will educate, inform, disarm critics and disabuse many of us of illusions all at once.
I'm just a software developer, without training in physics beyond an introductory course in college. Don't take my word on anything without checking it yourself or with someone whose knowledge of physics you trust.
