The church of SM physics

Quote from Wyttenbach

To tune for a background line you need a different approach. You also must run if for much longer than 10 minutes.

Are you saying that a background run for a much longer time would have revealed the expected background peaks more sharply and made them obvious as the most active discrete lines in the spectrum? Based on what I see in the 10 minute acquisition in Figure 2 I am surprised because the stochastic noise already seems very low there. But maybe there has been some smoothing associated with the Theremino software? Is that what you are saying?

Quote from Wyttenbach

We did use a standard software with a standard algorithm for peak enhancement. So what you see is not 1:1 what is in the histogram file. You can download Theremino and study it!

I would rather download the histogram file. Is it available?

Quote from Rob Woudenberg

From the Japanese publications I observe that they mainly focus on Japanese findings and theories.

Seems to be a general problem in science.. tribalism... it takes a few funerals to get over it.

CERN/ITER are extremely tribal.. Mizuno appears the least tribal for his age..

but there are younger ones..around... Itoh? both with Asian wives?..

BTW.... Japanese are are bit like certain Brits ... splendid non-continentals

my wife reacts a little to being called "Asian"

as for the great melting pot..it appears to be getting more tribal..becoming the disUSA

"from the heightening Alleghenies.." even unto MIT.

Hagelstein has persisted on the fringe of MIT for

a long time. Maseltov.

Hagelstein Metzler and Lu I am sure are also interested in the gammaspec results with D+rare earths.

they gammaspec'd Fe/Co in a very narrow study ..perhaps a polite enquiry will yield their opinion..

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Observation-of-non-exponential-decay-of-x-ray-and-%CE%B3-Metzler-Hagelstein/e4dcd31aa4e08e5264efdedcc0a1f9910edc834c

Experiments to investigate phonon-nuclear interactions

they may even have Asian roots or wear Levi genes,,( from Aaron)

ethnology is fascinating

Quote from RobertBryant

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/121824

Hagelstein et al have been mentioned before on LF but their preliminary results are of some relevance to this study.

"After applying mechanical stress to a sample, we observed a 19% enhancement above expected levels of 14.4 keV gamma emission from Fe-57 and a 17% enhancement above expected levels of Fe K-alpha emission (which to a large extent is driven by internal conversion from the 14.4 keV nuclear transition). The enhancements decayed away with a time constant of about 2.5 days"

It appears that the mechanical stress induced gamma emission...mechanical stress represents an energy input of much less than the 14 kev..

Of course in the rare earth study the energy input due to heating/cooling is also small..something much less than 0.1 eV... and the gamma emissions are at much higher levels

from a variety of isotopes...not just Fe57/Co...

At a 300 kev level average of gamma emission (magnetic transfer) the output of 20W/cc can be achieved with only a small part of the metal atoms being active at any one time..if a large part of the atoms were involved there would probably be a meltdown of the reactor...

cooperative effects where a large part of the atoms are rapidly involved have been observed with Niobium

https://www.tandfonline.com/do…1080/10420150.2014.988623.

.Nb93m has a long halflife 16 yrs which helped with Cheng's analysis

In the case of the "rare earth +D" isotopes...many of the halflives are much shorter

so the experimenter has to be 'on the ball' and use sophisticated analysis to

tease out the signals

. the control of the level of magnetic energy transfer is probably a major consideration in the design of a viable reactor with these very active but shortlived isotopes

Quote from RobertBryant

"rare earth +D" isotopes

is a convenient label..... maybe "lanthaniDic ecomix " is an alternative..

but neodymium, terbium,holmium,luthenium, are not there.maybe yttrium was inactive

The table below is in terms of the periodic table..probably not relevant at all to LENR function

but interesting

Rh103 was the subject of a previous SPAWAR dalliance... but it has a longhalf life...cycle time

a slow moving cog..maybe too slow

Sm151 is a socalled extinct isotope,,born again/resurrected

.in magnetic fire..

a fast moving cog.

perhaps there are bornagain thulium's to be revealed

then there is the historical Pd and Ag, and tellurium?

and W... perhaps I can multilayer my thoriated welding rods with an ecomix?

Quote from Wyttenbach

Because we selected elements with known activity in this range!

A cursory examination of livechart shows that it is important to use elements with relatively more

activity in this range.there are many elements which have relatively less...

eg Fe56. Notice the wide range of jumps, from 10Mev down to 10's of keV..

some of the jumps are uncertain...and the jumps may change significantly in a highly magnetic environment

Gamma spectrometry is not for dabbling.. some soild background is needed

Quote from RobertBryant

.there are many elements which have relatively less...

Note the difference in energy transitions btw Sm151 and Fe56.

Fe 56 is probably not useful for LENR. as with many more typical metal isotopes

for some reason the 'odd' isotopes like Sm151 tend to have more transitions in the low gamma levels... Ag107/109...etc

the kind of isotopes that may open up a bottleneck in the eco-flux...

Worth mentioning perhaps that we had reasonable success with wet electrolytic loading of what were initially solid SmCo magnets in heavy water. A twist of silver wire added to the anode was also useful - the wire vanished rapidly.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Why has the background its shape?? Because of overlapping back scattering from high energy gammas. Second because most gammas are in the range of 0..700keV!

Thanks for answering.

So much in your observations depends on the background and your background subtraction procedures. But, having read everything you have to say about them, I still do not understand some things.

First though, before proceeding with the things I don't understand, I will point out that I do understand why the background has its overall shape. That was never my concern. Instead, I asked previously why the active-sample spectrum, after having its background subtracted, still has the same shape as the background itself. Your answer seems to be that you planned it this way so as to locate the spectral lines you want to see below backscatter from some high energy sources you are worried about. I suppose that one always has to weigh one thing against another when planning an experiment, but the fact that the two distributions (background and background-subtracted signal) are so similar now means that you have to work hard to convince your readers that they are, in fact, different and independent of each other. I don't think you have done that here. A possible issue would be whether there is some flaw in the background-subtraction procedures. What happens when you use these procedures on a known source (a weak or distant one)? Do you get what you expect? And is the resulting spectrum different in shape from the background?

I still don't understand why the background in Figure 2 does not show the peaks you say you see (as described in your text). You say that you need to run the background acquisition for hours to see such lines but this seems strange to me. It sounds as though you are talking about Poisson noise (= shot noise), because that is the sort of noise that declines relative to a signal as the acquisition period becomes longer and longer. But I don't see a lot of that type of noise in Figure 2. I see a lot of continuously-distributed background signal, but it seems pretty well characterized after 10 minutes. I don't see how a longer acquisition time would make any difference unless the lines you claim to be present are tiny tiny tiny and that doesn't seem to be what you are saying. Do you have an example of a long-acquisition background spectrum you can show us where these lines appear prominently?

Quote from Bruce__H

Thanks for answering.

So much in your observations depends on the background and your background subtraction procedures. But, having read everything you have to say about them, I still do not understand some things.

First though, before proceeding with the things I don't understand, I will point out that I do understand why the background has its overall shape. That was never my concern. Instead, I asked previously why the active-sample spectrum, after having its background subtracted, still has the same shape as the background itself. Your answer seems to be that you planned it this way so as to locate the spectral lines you want to see below backscatter from some high energy sources you are worried about. I suppose that one always has to weigh one thing against another when planning an experiment, but the fact that the two distributions (background and background-subtracted signal) are so similar now means that you have to work hard to convince your readers that they are, in fact, different and independent of each other. I don't think you have done that here. A possible issue would by some flaw in the background-subtraction procedures. What happens when you use these procedures on a known source (a weak or distant one)? Do you get what you expect? And is the resulting spectrum different in shape from the background?

I still don't understand why the background in Figure 2 does not show the peaks you say you see (as described in your text). You say that you need to run the background acquisition for hours to see such lines but this seems strange to me. It sounds as though you are talking about Poisson noise (= shot noise), because that is the sort of noise that declines relative to a signal as the acquisition period becomes longer and longer. But I don't see a lot of that type of noise in Figure 2. I see a lot of continuously-distributed background signal, but it seems pretty well characterized after 10 minutes. I don't see how a longer acquisition time would make any difference unless the lines you claim to be present are tiny tiny tiny and that doesn't seem to be what you are saying. Do you have an example of a long-acquisition background spectrum you can show us where these lines appear prominently?

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Background gammas have a dinural drift pattern and are affected by weather to some degree. For example, wet ground suppresses NORM gammas, but fresh rain on dry ground can squeeze radon out for a short increase in gammas.

Quote from Bruce__H

still has the same shape

Bruce your seeming attention to detail is commendable

'shape' is not a detail

the detail is in the 'histogram', (as pointed out in the text)

The ' histogram'

which appears to be from derived rather a large file.. 300 lines each second or or so

over the course of hours days from

more than a dozen or so differing conditions.a a rather large database

perhaps the raw data file .. would be useful for you to analyse in your software

at Xmas time.

or over the course of 2022/2023?

Do you have software available and have you ever used it?

Do you have expertise in gamma spectrometry data analysis?

Can you reference some of your work?

for me the summary Figure 3 data is quite sufficient at this time

Fig 3 shows the huge increase over BG in lotsof isotope lines...

Sm 151 ,,, a supposedly extinct isotope.. with a halflife of 88 yrs will not show up in the 'shape' because as it is produced de novo as it were and is liable to be in low concentration

Quote from Paradigmnoia

dinural

fify diurnal.. perhaps Sm151 is squeezed out of 100 yr old Cornish bricks?

Quote from RobertBryant

fify diurnal.. perhaps Sm151 is squeezed out of 100 yr old Cornish bricks?

Anyways obviously an averaged background will be made from a spread of varying bin values for each channel. Therefore some will always be left over that are above the average, but well within the normal background range. Don’t forget that multiple gammas of different energies can go in the detector at once to make a combined signal, etc. Three successive background removals therefore leaves only the signals that are >3 x the averaged background, not necessarily 3 times the typical background range.

Quote from Wyttenbach

And last: We did use a standard software with a standard algorithm for peak enhancement. So what you see is not 1:1 what is in the histogram file. You can download Theremino and study it!

‘Peak enhancement’ algorithms have a tendency to turn noise into signals:

https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~toh/spectrum/ResolutionEnhancement.html

Quote from Wyttenbach

Daily variation was in the range of +-15% max.

So in theory a short period spectra could have up to 15 % of that spectra remaining when the long average is subtracted. Obviously the up to minus 15% part just disappears below the y 0 axis.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Most of background is just random noise. The delta of noise is noise again But signals (discrete lines) disappear.

Next time we will use a better environment for measurements. We checked a full steel box that further helps to cut down the background signal by a factor of 2.

As said. With signal:noise ratio above 3 there is no problem at all even with 1.5:1 as this is above the back max delta!

We were mostly looking at uranium over background daughters. With a 7 band gamma pack, we could cross-normalize with the other typical background elements. K Th Kr Rb U …Ir? Can’t remember all the ones it had at the moment.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

We were mostly looking at uranium over background daughters

Interesting,,,,

Have you got a paper published?

Anything to to do with actinides and halflife variation is of interest to me