It's a fascinating system, and Holmlid has been generous with sharing his methods and materials, I wish you luck with it. I'll try to think of someone placed to help you.
Ask Tom Grimshaw at Texas Tech (Austin) - he may know somebody in the NY region.
It's a fascinating system, and Holmlid has been generous with sharing his methods and materials, I wish you luck with it. I'll try to think of someone placed to help you.
Speaking of methods which should probably be of interest for those attempting a replication: for what it's worth, in his latest review paper he summarily described a "dusty" approach for producing Rydberg matter and ultradense hydrogen, where the Nd:YAG laser would be used to directly ablate pieces of catalyst material.
[...] One type of dense matter observation may however be close to continuous H(0). Under the conditions of interest, the vacuum chamber is filled with a visible mist, probably of H(l) Rydberg matter. Such a mist is formed after an hour or so of direct laser impact on catalyst pieces with the hydrogen gas pressure in the mbar range. [...]
It's unlikely that the starting catalyst structure would remain intact following this treatment (since basically the material would turn into plasma, produce a fine particulate and condense or get sputtered on surfaces surrounding the target as a thin film), and therefore there could now be stronger similarities with plasma-based systems in LENR. So, provided that a pulsed Nd:YAG laser is available, replicating the effect could be simpler and quicker than previously assumed using conventional industrial catalyst preparation techniques, which can be complex.
There were already hints of this happening to some extent in his experiments (if not from the catalyst to a limited degree, from the metals composing target material, which sometimes included for example Pt, Ir, or also Ni) in his previous papers and his theory, but the above seems to confirm it.
A pumped YAG laser possibly very similar to the type Homlid uses is around $1200 on Alibaba last time I looked -they are used for tatoo removal.
The main specifications for systems of that price range (searching "nd yag q switch laser" on http://www.alibaba.com) indeed seem to be in the ballpark of what Holmlid uses, i.e. 532/1064 nm, ~5ns pulse width, up to 10 Hz and up to 500-2000 mJ/pulse (although in his experiments this is typically <500 mJ/pulse), to be focused in such a replication into a beam of 50-100 µm diameter. They will likely have to be "hacked" in some way for automated operation rather than the intended handheld operation, but I have no idea about how dependable they are in practice compared to laboratory models.
Some of the cheaper models are stated to have a typical life of 1 million "shots", which at 10 Hz (at which pulse energy?) doesn't seem particularly long before presumably the lamps or something else has to be replaced. Efficiency might also be not so great if the aim is actually producing gainful energy, but under operating conditions even a 3.5 kW unit (max continuous AC power at the wall) might turn out to produce a decent gain in the form of emitted particles, considering 220 kW as in the example put by Holmlid in this recent open access paper.
http://doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1546090
The main issue would be then efficiently harvesting such energy since the particles would be fast and penetrating.
I'm not sure if this is the right thread to add this (it might get "buried" over time below other ones), but it's in continuation of the above comment. Out of curiosity I tried looking more in detail into what Leif Holmlid wrote in the paper linked above:
Quote from LHThe power required for running our old flash lamp–pumped Nd:YAG laser at 1- to 5-W laser power is of the order of a few hundred watts. It is believed that a modern diode-pumped optimized laser will use less than 100 W. The muon generator requires some slight heating of a few watts.
It does look like currently manufactured diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers might indeed be able to only use about 100W for a comparable peak pulse power (as an upper limit, 500 mJ / 5ns = 100MW/pulse). While the maximum pulse energy does not seem to be quite at the same level as flashlight-pumped lasers yet, picosecond Q-switched pulse lasers might work just as well if not better. A couple examples that I managed to find:
Furthermore the diodes in these lasers have a guaranteed lifetime in the range of generally at least 1-10 billions of shots instead of 0.1-1.0 millions of the cheap flashlight-pumped models from Ebay/Alibaba or the 20-100 million shots (often stated to be estimated at 80% power) of the quality-checked professional ones, as far as I've seen. A few supporting links below (1 billion shots at the usual 10 Hz would be enough for 3 years of continuous usage).
So, in principle the technology does already exist. The main issue is costs, probably because of limited economies of scale and the intended target user base. It's difficult to find actual figures around (vendors seem eager to make personalized prices and potential customers generally have to qualify themselves and ask for a quote), but it seems that the market price of these systems, when new, can range tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of euro/dollars as far as I understand, which is way beyond what an amateur or new experimenter could afford.
