Lock at R.Stringhams papers.
Read again, Stringham wrote, "At this time we cannot afford to look for the products of Qxproduction- the expensive analysis of helium". The fact that Stringham may hope that helium is produced, does not prove he produced it. You need to read papers more carefully.
Darden nearly a year [or more?] ago, he indicated that Rossi had a surprisingly good grasp of theoretical aspects of his work
Does Darden have any qualifications in the field of theoretical physics to make a judgement? Or was this just a salesman's flattering?
you will see the remarkable resemblance of the "blue light"
The human eye is a very poor analyser when it comes to interpreting colors. Perhaps any ressemblace would be clearer if spectra were published. Wishful thinking is not a substitute for scientific data.
axil. Thanks for editing your post above.
Regarding MFMP, I would be more convinced if their "Live Open Science" actually resulted in published scientific papers. A little more rigor and a bit less over-enthusiasm might pay dividends. Anyway, please give a reference to their gamma measurement(s).
axil. One of the greatest proponents of coherence being the cause of LENR was the late Giuliano Preparata. However he never demonstrated that the PdD lattice actually was coherent. If it had been there would be major anomalies in its specific heat etc.,
Preparata was honest enough to realize that not even coherence was enough to enhance fusion rates. He additionally required so called potential wells, 80-100 eV deep, to force naked deuterons close together. But any such wells would also attract positive helium nuclei even more strongly. As helium does not bind to palladium we can be sure the wells do not exist.
Coherence, by definition, is an ordered state. Thermodynamics requires that the spontaneous creation of ordered states requires the simultaneous release of heat. Conversely heating will tend to destroy coherence. But experimentally we observe a positive correlation of anomalous power with temperature, exactly the opposite of what coherence predicts. I think the coherent class of LENR explanations doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Invoking coherence is just one way of overcoming the Coulomb barrier. Other ways include muon catalyzed fusion, deep Dirac levels, Storm's electron screening etc. The important point to note is that the Coulomb barrier is not eliminated completely. There must still be QM tunneling. That being the case we expect the p-d->3He reaction to dominate (almost) regardless of hydrogen isotope ratios (due to the low reduced mass). We don't see the expected 3He so we know that LENR does NOT result from the mutual approach of hydrogen nuclei.
@Wyttenbach - Can you kindly give a reference to the He/Sonofusion correlation? I am sure @Eric Walker will be interested too!
The exception is Li7 which goes down to Li6.
Just because 6Li appears to increase relative to 7Li doesn't imply that is is a product. Conversely we do not know that 7Li is a fuel. But at least one of the 2 alternatives must be true.
To “climb the ladder” of nickel isotopes up to Ni-62 as Rossi’s bogus results imply would require the formation of Ni-59 as a first step.
In Fisher's theory more than 1 neutron can be transferred at a time? The argument from personal incredulity, is a well known fallacy. Just because someone has taken a course in nuclear physics doesn't mean they have studied any LENR theory.
But the bottom line is that whilst Fisher's theory does not predict any 59Ni, it does predict radio-active 66Ni which has not been observed. So it looks unlikely but we cannot be sure. After all Fisher may have wrongly assigned parameters to his model.
Hi Eric. How do you start a new thread? For now let's continue.
If you could permanently place 11 electrons inside the Pd104 nucleus, I calculate that the fission reaction you propose woulld be enhanced by 103 orders of magnitude which is still not enough to make any measurable heat.
I like your idea about platinum being involved. Does the experimental evidence suggest that the palladium cathode is the sole site of heat production? It's interesting that platinum (as a heater or temperature sensor) is also used in the Ni/H system ...
With Alphas we must not guess. They bang the lattice and destroy everything, leaving a big crater behind.
I think you are guessing. Alphas weigh 8000 times more than an electron and when interacting with electrons they can only accelerate them to their own speed (conservation of momentum). It follows that the maximum kinetic energy gain is 1/8000. So it doesn't leave a big crater behind exactly. (More of a long narrow furrow!). In the case of heavy elements, some X-radiation may occur. But in lighter palladium say, such radiation is absorbed by the apparatus and not observed.
104Pd could fission into 46Ca and 58Fe.
Alas the Gamow factor suppresses this fission by 136 orders of magnitude. 
It has never occured in the history of the universe. 
But this is a good example that both daughters are stable isotopes!
When alpha decay or fission occurs, the daughters can be expected to be populated in excited levels.
The vast majority of alpha decays by even-even isotopes produce no gammas at all and the daughters are created in their ground states just as theory predicts. This is because alpha decay rates are extremely sensitive to the alpha energy available to penetrate the Coulomb barrier. Production of excited daughters is inhibited by orders of magnitude. In the case of actinide fission this effect is less pronounced because the fission energy is hundreds of MeV and the excitation energies much lower.
The thermal conductivity of metals is such that a single nuclear reaction cannot cause visible melting. Observed hot spots must be the result of tens-hundreds of thousands of reactions all occurring in the vicinity. I conclude that the nuclear active site, whatever this name may mean, is not a chemical structure as it clearly survives some very violent treatment. Very few LENR models explain this key observation.
BTW Eric, I'm quite willing to start a new thread for this discussion.
Do you mean fission? Fission products are always beta/gamma emitters.
Always? Think of p+11B or p+15N reactions. There are many other counter examples where fragmentation produces non radio-active daughters. In fact I suggest that the eventual theoretical explanation for LENR will be along these lines.
Luckily the Forum puts the calorimetry aside and deals with nuclear matter. Enough with pipes, probes, dry or wet vapour. We are not plumbers but physicists and chemists.
I agree. After 27 years we must move beyond calorimetry and excess heat and make nuclear measurements to elucidate the nuclear reactions taking place (if any). It's alll very well inventing a way to make hot water but it will never be licensed (and will have no commercial future) unless the underlying science is completely understood. Which industrial nation will license an unknown nuclear technology?
Surprisingly it only takes about 3.6:1 Ni 62 to natural nickel, if the Ni62 has a bit of Ni64 in it. (About 0.5 to 0.6% Ni64 in the Ni62).Not an exact match, but pretty close.Just sayin....
Adding only Ni62 and Ni64 wouldn't change the Ni58 to Ni60 ratio. That ratio is not natural in the analyzed sample. So Rossi would have had so spike the sample/fuel with Ni60 as well.
As Paradigmnoia says, it's pretty close. I would say the ratios were suspiciously close given the mass measurements have some uncertainty. No need to spike with 60Ni too. I would be a little less suspicious if there were some reaction model which predicted the isotopic ratios (and no penetrating radiation). There are few possibilities. Perhaps the best of a poor bunch would be Fisher's theory which can rearrange neutrons.
What hints at fraud, is that only one sample was analysed. Rossi was trying to get $89M. Surely such a isotopic shifts would be evidence a major nuclear transmutation, and one would have expected a little more rigor in the sample handling. Did IH know of this analysis even?
A more vivid test is this one involving U238 where increase in fission decay produced are detected. Would you like to look at that?
What evidence should I look at? Please cite the reference.
Nobody thought to test my calculations?
I had already made the calculation and I agree with you!
Measuring gamma is an invalid indicator in the LENR environment
That's why alphas are measured using Ortec 6519-P alpha-spectrometer!
For the 2nd time of asking, "Can you quote the text where the alpha level increased please?".
For the tird time, what is the evidence that, ""the weak force being amplified"?
In your view, what can the alpha rate decline mean, if anything?
I already answered this question in detail: segregation. Now why don't you answer where the paper claims a measurement of an increase in rate at every pulse?
My understanding is that in regular fission, the daughters are often left in an excited state; or is this wrong?
By regulat fission I suppose you mean fission of heavy isotopes. I think this is correct. Heavy isotopes have far more excited states than light isotopes. We know that the neutrons emitted from actinide fission have energies of only a few MeV typical of the energies of excited states. This suggests that fission creates 2 excited daughters which successively decay by neutron emission and then by beta emission. In fact it is impossible to model a neavy fission process in which neutron emission were simultaneous with fission.
But for LENR generally speaking we are not dealing with actinides. And anything lighter is not likely to fission at any reasonable energy with the possible exception of alpha emission. Because of the Coulomb barrier for fission / alpha emission the expected fragmentations, will be those that leave the daughters in the ground state. Hence, few gammas! This is why hot d-d fusion only produces 1 gamma in 10000000 events. (Another factor is spin).
I think your conclusions generally make sense.
May be next time You read the paper before you add a comment...
Maybe every time you could cite what I failed to read instead of making ad hominem attacks.
when the laser was off, the alpha level increased. the laser pulsed at a rate of many times a second. In that condition, your assertion does not apply
Can you quote the text where the alpha level increased please?
The paper actually says, "the activity is decreased by a factor of 2 after 1 hour exposure to laser beam". This time scale is consistent with segregation. In solution we expect some alpha active heavy metal polonides to be insoluble and to precipitate (e.g. PbPo). Segregation is expected. In addition the temperature increase due to laser illumination will accellerate the loss of of radon from the liquid.
Incidentally the alpha decay rates, interesting as they may be have little bearing on your claim of "the weak force being amplified".
google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&e…TUA&bvm=bv.46471029,d.dmQ
I glanced at the paper you cited. I read, "The decrease of alpha activity of the exposed solutions is accompanied by the deviation of gamma activities of daughter nuclides of Uranium 232
from their equilibrium values." This suggests an error because the first 5 daughters of 232U hardly emit any gammas. In fact the so called deviation occurs in the 212Pb gamma spectrum. The counts are so low (fig. 3) that the minor deviations appear to be statistical variations.
As for the claimed alpha decay rate anomalies this was not measured; rather it was calculated from the drop in alpha activity. A prosaic explantion is that segregation of the tiny quantities of alpha radioactive daughters may have occured. This is a highy speculative paper but perhaps it will be peer reviewed and published somewhere.
Prompt gammas are obviously detectable. But the excited states that normally produce them might relax via other channels, e.g., something akin to internal conversion, when taking place in an electron-rich environment.
Yes the excited states might decay by other channels. But internal conversion is a relatively slow process compared to gamma decay. It is extemely improbable that internal conversion like processes can suppress gamma emission in every case. We need to look for different explanations for the absence of gammas. The obvious candidate is fragmentation.
MY I think you are wrong about the law but correct in your assessment of the outcome. If Rossi can prove fraud he need only demonstrate loss of $89M to claim triple (punitive) damages. After having already paid Rossi $11.5M, and after NOT receiving the know-how necessary to raise more money, it's likely there will be slim pickings even if Rossi were to win. Who is going to invest in IH (or Rossi) whilst there is uncertainty? More to the point, why is Rossi creating uncertainty when he could easily come to a compromise by transferring the know-how? That would be a win-win situation.
I do expect that proton capture of an electron can occur inside the nucleus under the weak force is possibly amplified under the LENR reaction, but it is an effect of the reaction and not a cause.
Electron capture by a proton is endothermic by 782 keV. In fact only 5 natually occuring isotopes can exothermically capture electrons. But if 782 keV were somehow available then at least 70 isotopes could be formed of which 60 would be radio-active. I think that observation alone makes the Widom Larsen theory rather unlikely. In the case of 58Ni we would expect the final production of 58Fe plus net heat.
I have never heard of the weak force being amplified ... Can you quote a reference ?
