At 02:05 PM 12/9/2009, you wrote:
Have you considered ultra-low momentum neutrons, as proposed by WL that never even leave the local environment, and which therefore would not cause NA, or very little NA?
Correct me if I'm wrong, somebody. Thermal neutrons are neutrons which have momentum determined by thermal equilibrium. I.e., if a neutron were formed with "ultra-low momentum" (relative to what?), it would rapidly become a thermal neutron from interactions with other present species. And thermal neutrons fuse with lots of stuff, because there is no Coulomb barrier. Fusion lowers with higher energy, for some nuclei, because of elastic collision, the neutrons, so to speak, bounce off.
One aspect of the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect is that the electrostatic repulsion of the target nucleus acting on the incident deuteron is that this slows the deuteron (and its bound neutron) to the point where that neutron can get close enough for the binding force between it and the target nucleus can start to act, resulting in the stripping of the neutron from the proton and the ejection of the proton with more energy than it came in with, the binding energy of the deuteron's proton and neutron are added to the incident kinetic energy. (This is all easy to visualize with classical physics, as if the binding energies were springs.)
It is as if the neutron came in with negative energy (which might be part of what Horace is talking about) and it's possible that the target nucleus is left in the ground state.
The materials available in the lattice are fairly restricted, as to primary reactions. There is palladium, there are dissociated deuterium ions, there are the electrons that are shared across the lattice, and there may be a certain incidence of deuterium molecules, undissociated, particularly near the surface. However, what could fuse with deuterium, in terms of ULM neutrons, could fuse with palladium.
Now, if the neutrons are generated in some way such that spatially they wouldn't have time to get to the palladium before they fuse with deuterium, maybe. But such reactions would be expected to create a family of products, and I'm not aware of those products being detected in sufficient quantities. d + n would create tritium, and then what?
