Posts by can

It's interesting to put those numbers in perspective. It is easy to normally assume that the number of cosmic muons reaching the Earth's surface would instead be many orders of magnitude larger, in comparison.

I suspect Holmlid et al. might be planning a system where the generated mesons and muons would be scattered and stopped by layer of UDH surrounding the laser target, but whether this would be materially feasible (i.e. possible to develop into an actually useful product) within short timetables is not clear to me, even if technically it should be.

Does the above explanation account for the fact that the initially formed pions and kaons—in the order of 10¹³ emitted per laser pulse—are suggested from time-of-flight and decay times to have a kinetic energy (i.e. excess energy) up to almost 100 MeV?

The European patent office basically wants more tangible and independent evidence of the existence of an ultra-dense phase of hydrogen before it can award patents for methods or apparatuses improving its production and usage. So, perhaps a more efficient way for building an IP portfolio would be focusing on aspects that are useful or novel on their own, before any UDH involvement.

Rob Woudenberg

This is just my hypothesis, but possibly, even if it would not have to be transported and used from elsewhere, the slow accumulation of tritium as well as neutron emission from D+D fusion could be inconvenient for fast commercialization, even if a muon-catalyzed fusion system might be more straightforward to build than the proposed annihilation reactor.

A new open-access paper on the annihilation reactions from ultra-dense hydrogen just got published. It can be regarded as an expanded version of the appendix provided in the latest version of the paper recently uploaded on ResearchSquare.

Energy production by laser-induced annihilation in ultradense hydrogen H(0)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/…cle/pii/S0360319921004080

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2021.01.212 (DOI not available yet)

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Highlights

• Laser-induced annihilation processes exist in ultra-dense hydrogen H(0)
• The energy balance from two baryons is closed within an uncertainty of 2 MeV
• The energy efficiency from mass to useable energy is around 46%.
• The energy loss is to neutrinos. Ordinary hydrogen gives 1.1 TWh energy per kg
• H(0) gives nuclear power without direct neutron emission and with no nuclear waste

As far as I recall, their model is different and more complex than Holmlid's (who basically mostly redirects the reader to Hirsch regarding the detailed theory), but they do point out that both the condensation energy and nuclear reactions can be a source of excess heat. They have other papers citing Holmlid and ultra-dense hydrogen (in reference to the electron structure).

Celani has apparently de-emphasized a correlation to ultra-dense hydrogen in his latest presentations compared to older ones, if you check them out on Researchgate.

Alan Smith

That seems similar to what the excerpt above also is implying. As for the increased conductivity at high temperatures, I'm not sure. The same excerpt mentions it is due to "thermally excited electronic energy levels in the catalyst", but in in the literature it is indeed reported that magnetite has a higher conductivity than hematite, at least in rocks.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1071/ASEG2012ab232

After testing with a small magnet pile some fragments of the brittle black/dark portions composing the K-Fe oxide pellets after acetone or ethanol exposure, it turns out that are strongly ferromagnetic. So, the color, and probably the apparent conductivity, might be not (just) because of carbon, but mainly reduction to iron and/or magnetite instead. Or, something else is going on.

This shouldn't anyway be entirely unexpected as a similar behavior was apparently noted for actual catalysts in this 45 years-old paper which I linked at the beginning of the thread: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01614947408071864

Drgenek

Holmlid starts seeing a signal both from the CE experiments and other experiment types typically after a few hours of gas admission through the catalyst(s). At the same time, so-called "spontaneous" nuclear reactions start occurring at a low rate, without a laser. Additionally, the signal can be depleted by applying the laser continuously, only to get restored after a longer period of gas admission without using the laser. Some of these observations have been pointed out for example in a recent preprint.

If the laser directly produced UDH in his experiments, wouldn't results be obtained right away and always? His results seem to instead suggest that something is slowly produced by the catalysts by the hydrogen gas flow and accumulates on suitable surfaces under his testing conditions.

I don't rule out that pulsed lasers may directly cause nuclear reactions under conditions similar to those where such observations have been made also with electric arcs or sparks. To me, it does not seem to be Holmlid's case with the experiments performed in the gas phase at pressures generally much lower than atmospheric, however.

Drgenek

It is not the laser that is producing ultra-dense hydrogen/deuterium in Holmlid's experiments. Their detection was initially accomplished not through the nuclear products, but from the kinetic energy of ultra-dense fragments (in the "Coulomb explosion experiments", or "CE experiments") ejected by the laser pulses which would strip some loosely bound electrons in the normally tightly bound clusters. The fragments would then fly apart due to Coulomb repulsion, and from flight times and knowing the masses involved, atom-atom distance would be calculated.

This open-access paper describes in more technical detail this type of experiment. UDD or UDH (or D(0) and p(0) as they are usually called) are collected on various metal surfaces below the catalyst and results are presented for both of them: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4947276

Quote from Alan Smith

Not impossible, but you also mention carbon deposition - this could also conduct current so that effectively you have 2 resistances in parallel for part of the wire at least.

A possibility I was thinking about is that the ceramic pellet might be simply becoming more conductive due to partial reduction to metal. The presence of carbon on the surface would then be coincidental, as possibly under these conditions it would consume ambient oxygen before the same oxygen could re-oxidize the ceramic material. A related consideration is that porous materials made from consecutive oxidation cycles (e.g. Celani wires) may then decrease their resistance not due to hydrogen absorption directly, but due to the layers turning metallic.

But—before I get asked this question—why should this effect be of any interest? The reason is that Rydberg matter is supposed to be a conductive material, and some may be formed inside the catalyst material as hydrogen gets absorbed. Alternatively, the increased conductivity could be due to ultra-dense hydrogen formation, but it's unlikely that the superconductive states would be present at the temperatures involved here (these states disappear above a certain temperature). So, if any of these could be easily formed and measured with the crude methods used here, it would be very useful and indicate that simpler experiments for their detection may be possible.

Sveinn Ólafsson has done conductivity experiments from Rydberg matter in a high-vacuum cell and a different setup, but they have not been reported in detail in a full paper yet.

Rob Woudenberg

It's difficult to know exactly whether the differences observed in typical Pd experiments have to do with the different physical properties of H and D (the latter for instance diffusing slower in metals) or the apparent difference in susceptibility to external influences (electric, magnetic fields, etc) of ultra-dense protium condensation compared to that of deuterium. From theory, it is expected that D will generate more heat locally (see a few posts ago for direct excerpts), as well as He from D+D fusion.

EDIT: for what it's worth, I have been once told that p(0) is more easily formed with some deuterium around and that the necessity to keep magnetic fields down is documented. From what I could read in his papers, Holmlid started reporting p(0) with more certainty when he probed it with the laser on "carrier materials" away from the catalyst rather than close to the surface of the catalyst. I'm not sure how (and if) such situation would be applicable to electrolytic or gas-loaded pure Pd experiments from the LENR field, though.

Here is another test with a different powered-catalyst pellet having roughly half the resistance.

Similar overall results were observed after adding acetone (which caused a rapid decrease in resistance possibly due to hydrogen—although I cannot rule out other causes), but this time the jar vessel, which I had to replace due to breakage, was apparently better sealed and eventually I had to open the lid to let air in. This caused resistance to increase much faster. The final resistance matched the starting value of 2.85 Ohm. The minimum value at 13V was 1.97 Ohm.

Alan Smith

Electrical conduction certainly occurs not just through the heating wire but also through the ceramic material into which the coil is embedded. More than just the thin layer on top however I think it might be the ceramic material itself becoming more conductive, possibly due to hydrogen-caused effects.

Recently I have been making tests with a semi-closed vessel and noticed that the resistance of Kanthal A-1 wires wires treated similarly to previously described would decrease noticeably upon admission of organic compounds like acetone or ethanol.

Acetone in particular would initially combust on the wire, producing a heat burst, but then, as oxygen gas got used up, it decomposed on its surface, causing carbon deposition and presumably hydrogen evolution. I think such hydrogen is what is causing this resistance decrease. At the same time, as the wire gets dark, incandescence becomes dim, perhaps due to the wire acting as a more efficient infrared radiator.

Since the cell is not sealed and air can come in (as well as hydrogen and acetone go out), the wires would eventually acquire back their oxidized color. As this happened, resistance slowly increased back to the starting values.

I tried this with a brand-new bare Kanthal wire and although to a much lesser extent, the effects were still visible (resistance decrease and incandescence dimming).

I then attempted this with a "powered catalyst pellet", which in this case involved embedding the same Kanthal heater in a 75% Fe2O3–25% K2CO3 paste and calcining it to high temperatures to form a hard ceramic pellet similar to actual industrial catalysts, only much larger (approx. 60x6 mm) and with an internal heat source.

Upon admission of about 1.5 ml acetone in the cell (involving temporarily opening it), the previously resistance decrease effect turned out to be much larger, causing a repeatable drop from 5.7 Ohm to about 3.6 Ohm. This drop was repeatable. Notice how turning power off in the second half of the diagram apparently did not affect the trend in resistance.

In the process (still keeping the catalyst at a constant 13V with the recently acquired power supply), the powered pellet first got covered in carbon, but eventually, possibly corresponding to the resistance minima in the above graph, the carbon apparently slowly started combusting and eventually mostly disappear. Resistance would then return back to roughly the initial values.

After a few mishaps following such testing, eventually the ceramic portion broke in half, although the wire didn't. After a period at room temperature the material looks red.

It's not clear how much this effect is related to hydrogen absorption, but it's interesting that it could be easily observed with this kind of material.

Rob Woudenberg

They are already producing electricity, dissipated by the 50 Ohm load of the oscilloscope used (Tektronix TDS 3032), in the meson decay experiments, from a metal foil or sheet in the flight path of the particles generated by the laser-induced reaction.

EDIT: I have to clarify that it's my understanding, since the muons are suggested to dissipate their energy as they travel through metals via a pair production mechanism, and that the signal observed through metal sheets ("collectors") in the meson experiments is suggested to be due to muons causing the ejection of secondary electrons from them. However, upon checking out recent papers to be sure, it does not seem that a correlation between the two observations has been explicitly pointed out.

The muons could be reflected back to the absorbing material as needed to avoid wasting them. As they (+/-) slow down through metals, they would cause numerous pair production events before they decay—that's the process I linked earlier from Holmlid on ResearchGate. It's also mentioned in the paper above, which was written before the other:

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The muons interact with the converter at the PMT mainly by pair production, giving electron - positron pairs which can be detected by the PMT detector, before they decay (submitted).

This pair production mechanism is also the same used for the detection of mesons in other experiments, producing a current observed with the low-impedance input of a fast oscilloscope.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1402-4896/ab1276

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8.7 Kaons

[...] The signal observed at the collector is in fact due to muons which are formed by decay of charged kaons moving relatively slowly out from the H(0) generator. So the decay observed is due to the decreasing flux of muons ejected by the decaying kaons after the laser pulse. The muons eject secondary electrons at the collector, which gives the signal current.

Rob Woudenberg

Why use a gas? Muons would be most easily slowed down with heavy materials (metals), and if needs be, UDH itself could be used, which has been proposed (and observed) to be able to scatter fast particles like muons and so on.

https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(18)34875-8

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[...] Of special interest are the scattering properties of a layer of H(0) [19, 29]. Such a layer reflects charged particles even at high energy, due to the extreme density of this layer. This means that muons may have their final scattering interaction at such a layer on the target before moving to the detector.

Rob Woudenberg

Apparently, for each muon (positive or negative) up to about 50 electron–positron pairs may be produced according to the energy-dissipation mechanism described here: https://www.researchgate.net/p…by_lepton_pair-production

If Storms' repeatedly advanced suggestions have some validity, other metals should work too as long as the formation of the necessary gaps and sufficient permeability to hydrogen (or deuterium) are ensured. For example, perhaps just inexpensive Nickel foil could be used and the inert impurities could possibly be added just by sanding down the surface with SiC sandpaper, but without removing the dust produced before folding and cold rolling the piece again (and many other times).

Quote from nickec

Yes, I do realize this is at odds with the idea that LENR is a surface effect.

Inner surfaces (or gaps/cracks, or interfaces), which the process will likely produce, should count too.