Using the powder gradient technique, the team of Charles Entenman (Keely Keene, Rebecca Kitko and others of the Biolife Team) tested increasingly less conductive semiconductors. (For the record, with John Giles, our best results at Deuo Dynamics were obtained with the palladium / aluminum nitride pair, which is a high resistivity semiconductor.)
But Charles Entenman’s team discovered something extraordinary: even with a perfectly insulating powder in the diode, such as fine sand, diatomaceous earth, cellulose, we still observe the appearance of spontaneous tension. This tension persists for several months. This effect is also achieved by separating the palladium and metal electrodes with paper or asbestos.
I admit that I did not believe in this effect, I feared an experimental error but I now admit my mistake: I was wrong.
The team assembled by Charles Entenmann, using a fog chamber, demonstrated the emission of highly energetic charged particles by fusion diodes. Note that the particles manage to pass through the plastic or metal wall of the diode. Their energy is therefore greater than the megaelectronvolt. (For the record, the beta particles emitted by phosphorus 32 have a maximum energy of 1.7 MeV, and they can pass through about 0.8 mm of plastic. Protons and helium nuclei are even less penetrating.)
Obviously, the ionization that causes fusion diodes to polarize is not due to these rare charged particles, otherwise it would require a much larger flux. We will not discuss these particles in this poster.
Please remember that the electric current flowing through an ionization chamber is extremely weak and must be strongly amplified to be detectable, including when the source is located inside the ionization chamber. To obtain such a current between electrodes of metals of different ionization potential (eg zinc and copper, or cesium and copper) would require an activity greater than one curie! (The curie is a huge unit, equivalent to the activity of one gram of radium!)
However, this effect really does exist, I checked it recently and I punlished the result during ICCF 23 and IWAHLM 14. This effect deserves with no doubt to be called the "ENTENMANN EFFECT"