Public funding of investigations into LENR?

Quote from Longview

Julian Bianchi above also points to this as a key piece of data. I don't see conclusive evidence yet in casual browsing. Perhaps the question has been examined and answered empirically.

If there is little or no difference in branching ratios, that would admittedly be a strong piece of evidence against a whole category of cold fusion theories.

We are by no means first to ask this question. Here at SJ Byrnes' blog: http://sjbyrnes.com/cf/muons/

"Experimentally, there are tons of muon-catalyzed fusion experiments, but in my (cursory) search I have not found any papers that took the appropriate data to figure out whether or not this branch actually happens."

Unfortunately Byrnes is not even addressing a change in the usual branching ratios, that is:

• D+D → neutron + helium-3 (~50% of the time),
• D+D → proton + tritium (~50% of the time),
• D+D → helium-4 + a gamma-ray (0.0001% of the time)

But instead is concerned with what Byrnes calls the "spectator" branch, which might enable practical muon catalyzed fusion:

• D+D+muon → helium-4 + muon
  

So, in spite of the interesting discussion at the Byrnes blog, I will continue to browse.

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See eg Chapter 4.2 of IMHO the best review on muon catalyzed fusion:

http://www.annualreviews.org/d…9.001523?journalCode=nucl

Quote from H-G Branzell

So if you use brute force to overcome the Coulomb barrier you would create a nuclid that decays by emittig a a 1 Mev gamma photon?

LENR does not use brute force. LENR uses strong H-fields to attach to the nuclear moment.

Quote from Eric Walker

I have also heard that muon-catalyzed dd fusion exhibits the same branching ratios as seen in regular fusion.

A muon has at elast 105MeV excess energy. If only a small part (some MeV) stays in one nucleus, then you have high energy fusion, certainly not LENR.

Quote from Longview

As you must know, the muon is able to more easily enter a nucleus for the simple reason that it has 207 times the mass of an electron, hence "orbits" at 1/207 the distance from a candidate nucleus (otherwise it has the same one electron charge).

The muons owns one more photon thus it has one extra dimension. This is also the reason why all experiments with muons show other charge radii than the ones with electrons. But as long as the standard model stays in place and people just believe in their simple symmetry talk, they will soon produce an ever bigger mess.

Read also https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01489

Gabriel Lee,1, 2 , ∗ John R. Arrington,3 , † and Richard J. Hill1 , ‡

Extraction of the proton radius from electron-proton scattering data

Wyttenbach

Nice reference to these radii problems. I think this research could point mainstream physics in the right direction. If you combine this with the "where is the photon after absorption" question...

But I think there is a QM way to solve these problems. Just add some probability densities here and there and everything is fine again

Quote from H-G Branzell

https://www.researchgate.net/p…on-Energy-Development.pdf

14 MeV neutrons are produced.

So at least in this case we can see that catalyzed fusion produces high energy particles not compatible LENR experiments.

That experiment used D-T gas, not pure deuterium. So its different and the results cannot be used for your argument. Also, the reactions occurred in pure D-T, without metal. Hence the reaction occurred in a low electron density environment.

Cold fusion in deuterated metal has several characteristics that (alone or in combination) may plausibly alter the branching ratio and type of energy emitted:

1) high electron density environment
2) deuterons have extremely low energy/momentum at impact
3) charge screening by electron (instead of muon)

I understand there are theoretical reasons for arguing that these will not affect the branching ratio and/or gamma emission. But these are theoretical arguments which are NOT based on experimental tests of the above characteristics. It is not proper scientific logic to use an experimentally-unproven theoretical argument to rule out an empirical result.

Quote from H-G Branzell

There are thousands of nuclids and their modes of decay have been thoroughly investigated. It does not matter how an excited nuclid was created, be it cold or warm fusion, it will meet the same fate: sudden death with a small number of pieces flying off in various directions.

You may seach the chart of nuclids from left to right, from top to bottom and you will never find a nuclid that disposes of 1 MeV suplus energy in 1 M cosy 1 eV packages. This is why a LENR reaction must produce easily detectable ionizing radiation.

The conditions present in LENR have not been experimentally tested for nuclear effects in fusion reactions. For example, if fusion is catalyzed by electron charge screening, then there will be an electron between the deuterons as they fuse. This may affect the type of energy emission from the product nucl

Muon-catalyzed fusion does illuminate the question of how low deuteron momentum may affect the reaction. But the muon catalyzed fusion experiments provide no information about the other characteristics: effects of nearby screening electrons or metallic high electron density environment. And these "electron factors" may interact with the low impact momentum feature of LENR.

So, the theoretical arguments against LENR are reasonable, but they are not experimentally supported with regards to the specific characteristics of LENR. IMO, the anti-LENR theoretical arguments do not have experimental support strong enough to rule out LENR.

Quote from Debarium

IMO, the anti-LENR theoretical arguments do not have experimental support strong enough to rule out LENR.

I'll add to this: it is important to distinguish "LENR" as a set of reports of low-level experimental phenomena from "LENR" as a cluster of preferred explanations for those experimental phenomena centering around the fusion of deuterium, which are advanced by prominent researchers in the field.

While it is possible that the novel experimental conditions you list could raise enough doubts about the applicable context of existing physical theory to warrant taking a closer look at the possibility of screened fusion of deuterium, known physics could also successfully cast certain explanations into doubt for all intents and purposes and still not deal with the problem of LENR as an experimental phenomenon apparently exhibiting, at different times, supra-chemical heat, helium generation, transmutations, x-rays and prompt particles. One can impugn a whole class of high-level explanation without escaping the problem of explaining the low-level results: their explanation may not be the one we wanted, but they still need explaining. (By contrast, some prefer to explain the results away, via sometimes implausible but creative mechanisms of artifact.)

There are many things one would expect to see if deuterium fusion was happening which are not reported. Each such thing that one holds onto becomes another liability against the explanation that requires resorting to "something unknown must happening to make it work." We want to minimize the number of these escape hatches as much as possible. At some point, one should ask, "is deuterium really being fused, or can the results be explained by something else?"