After reviewing Simon Brink's website at http://www.subtleatomics.com/ and watching his ICCF-21 presentation I think that there should be a thread for discussion about his theory, his experiments, the ramifications of his work, and the application of the information toward high powered LENR.
There is much to discuss, and I hope he'll participate on this thread. However, in a nutshell, the limited understanding I've gathered is as follows.
Fractional hydrogen states may exist and be similar - however different in some fundamental ways - to those predicted and allegedly verified by Randell Mills and BLP. The production of these fractional states can be triggered by exposing atomic hydrogen (or deuterium or tritium) to catalytic elements. From there, these shrunken hydrogen atoms with a reduced electric charge can be captured by other atoms to induce LENR reactions. Another stage of reactions beyond LENR is also conjectured.
What I find interesting is that both lithium and nickel are catalysts that are alleged to interact with hydrogen at the ground state to produce species with fractional states. I'm assuming that both lithium and nickel would need to exist in an atomized form to induce hydrogen atoms to de-excite and lose energy (something that BLP has discovered in tests utilizing strontium and lithium). Using this theory to examine some alleged high power LENR systems, I can think of ideas of why the use of plasma (even in powder based systems) could be so important. One reason could be that "hot" protons crashing into the nickel could impact with enough energy to produce nickel vapor. This vapor could then interact with atomic hydrogen to induce the formation of fractional states of hydrogen. The resulting modified hydrogen could be absorbed by nearby atoms to produce even more output power. I'm also thinking that some optimal frequency applied to the environment of the reactor could enhance the rate of these reactions.
I would also like to applaud Simon Brink for continuing his research despite the previous persecution he experienced.
No company should try to squash non-commercial basic research.
I think they did so to try and prevent him from making the LENR connection.