New Energy Times Portal for W-L theory:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml
Right off, I've noticed something.
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/GarwinWidomLarsenThread.pdf
contains correspondence between Krivit, Richard
Garwin, and Lewis Larsen. Garwin asked the kind of question I'd ask:
Dear Dr. Larsen,
I suppose you have calculated the effectiveness of these materials in
shielding against external x-rays and gamma rays.
Could you send me those calculations and the results of any experimental
measurements?
And Garwin added a note to Krivit:
Dear Steve Krivit,
Now you have a story.
Indeed. Larsen replied:
Dear Richard:
You are correct - we have not responded to your prior questions about the
LENR gamma shielding application.
We did not answer those particular questions because of underlying
intellectual property issues.
Nonetheless, we thank you again for your interest in our work.
The implication is obvious. Widom-Larsen theory
is not backed by disclosed experimental evidence,
and, quite possibly, the theory itself has not
been completely described. This should be
familiar to those who followed the early days of
the CF saga, where efforts at replication were,
to some degree, hampered by lack of disclosure
from Pons and Fleischmann, possibly for the same
reasons (perhaps required by the University of Utah lawyers.)
The whole exchange should be read. The occasion
for Garwin's letter was that Garwin had made an
off-hand comment about the gamma shielding
problem, Krivit had reported this to Larsen, and
Larsen had asked about that. Krivit, by the way,
while he is to be commended for writing the
complete report, has misrepresented Garwin in his top-level quotation on this:
Richard Garwin, Nuclear Physicist key
participant in the Manhattan Project and
designer of the first hydrogen bomb :
<http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/GarwinWidomLarsenThread.pdf>
I
didnt say it was wrong
Right. He didn't say it was wrong. Rather, he
asked a devastating question that reveals that
the theory could be smoke and mirrors. Or not,
but that we hadn't, as of then, been given the
evidence to think there might be something to it.
The obvious objections have not been answered.
Here is the full quote from Garwin:
I didn't say it was wrong. I said that I had not
received a reply to my question/suggestion about
using such a material as a shield against
high-energy gamma or x-rays.
This is crucial to the theory. It suggests that
ULM neutrons are generated by patches of heavy
electrons at the surface of the metal hydride
(miracle one: the supposed high voltage gradient
is not known to be present and probably isn't.
Miracle two: neutrons generated by the
interaction of these heavy electrons with protons
or deuterons are ultra-low momentum and thus have
a very high fusion cross-section. Why ULM? After
all, the heavy electrons are high momentum, and
momentum is conserved.) And then these neutrons
cause transmutations by being absorbed. (Not a
miracle in itself, slow neutrons would do that.
However, normally this absorption is accompanied
by a gamma ray, so, miracle three: the gamma ray
is absorbed with high efficiency, like ten inches
of lead, by this "patch" of "heavy electrons.")
And then there is more, this is just the start!
I'm a bit gratified that some of my own immediate
objections were similar to those raised by
Garwin. Makes me feel not quite so stupid, though
I certainly don't agree with Garwin on plenty....
Now, in 2006, Widom and Larsen had published, in
EPJ-C,
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2006/2006Widom-UltraLowMomentumNeutronCatalyzed.pdf
Hagelstein and Choudhary published, in J.Phys.B,
in 2008, an examination of the claims and some
investigations.
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2008/2008Hagelstein-ElectronMassShift-PUB.pdf
Krivit calls this a "critique," but it was
narrow. Widom, Srivastava, and Larsen then
published, on arXiv,
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/2008Widom-ErrorsInTheQuantum.pdf.
Again, Krivit calls this a "Rebuttal to
Hagelstein and Chaudhary Critique." It's looking
like J.Phys.B did not publish it, if it was sent to them.
And then there is a recent paper, also published
on arXiv, October, 2008.
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2008/2008Widom-PrimerForElectroWeak.pdf.
In it, I find this to justify the high electric
fields postulated to exist at the surface of metal hydrides [p. 4]
Such a collective
proton motion at an infra-red frequency will resonate
with electronic surface plasmon oscillations leading
to the local breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer
approximation[26]. They will also lead to large collective
proton oscillation amplitudes. This explains the large
mean proton displacement /u = ~2.2 Angstroms estimated
from the neutron scattering experiments and a
mean electric field estimate through Eq(26)
/E = ~28.8 x 10^11 Volts/meter (27)
which is over 10 times larger than [the energy needed
to overcome the barrier preventing electrons from
converting protons to neutrons] thus proving that
the plasma oscillations on metallic hydride surfaces do
provide internal local electric fields more than sufficient
to accelerate the surface plasmon polariton electrons in
overcoming the threshold barrier.
I can't believe it! Have I missed something? They
have compared a voltage gradient with a net
energy needed to penetrate a barrier. A particle
will accelerate through the gradient, gaining the
energy represented by the gradient times the
distance over which the gradient is maintained.
The energy needed is given earllier in the paper
at about 0.5 x 10^6 volts. So the field would
have to be maintained over a distance of about 6
x 10^-4 meter. An angstrom is 10^-10 meter. I see
no sign that this is even close to what they claim.
Plus theory never "proves" anything. Indeed, I
have a problem with the idea that science
"proves" anything, outside of a special universe
of accepted axioms, but normally, it is
experimental evidence that proves theoretcial
predictions, and what W-L are doing is making a
theoretical prediction. Where is the experimental
evidence for it? The "large mean proton
displacement" of 2.2 A is hardly proof of what they claim!
Reading what the paper says about nuclear
transformations in CF cells, I find they talk
about successive reactions, i.e., helium is explained by
Li-6 + n -> Li-7 (plus gamma, waved away by
absorption by all those heavy electrons)
Li-7 + n -> Li-8 (plus gamma)
Li-8 -> Be-8 plus beta
Be-8 -> 2 He-4
This is the rate problem. The neutrons must be
produced at very low levels to be consistent with
the very low levels of transmutations found.
There must therefore be substantial time between
the production of the neutrons at any location.
So when Li-7 is formed, most of it would drift
away by diffusion before it was available for
another neutron, and given all the attractive
targets floating about, it would be an
extraordinary coincidence for this particular
nucleus to get another neutron. So much more Li-7
must be produced than is Li-8/Be-8/helium. And
the most attractive target for the neutrons is
not the small amounts of lithium that might be
present, but palladium. Deuterium as well would
be a reasonable target, which produces tritium,
which is easily detected. The reactions described
in this paper don't even mentin deuterium, and
therefore predict only that each heavy electron
would produce two neutrons per electron (from
fusing with deuterium) than with hydrogen.
This is far from convincing! None of this seems
to be accepted, now that people have had some time to look at it.
Now, to the Hagelstein/Chaudhary comments. They
write, about the very heavy electrons that W-L claim:
Of course, a mass shift this large is unexpected and
unprecedented. To develop such a large mass shift, intuition
suggests that the electron must interact with the local
environment with at least a comparable interaction strength.
Under the relatively benign environment of a metal hydride,
it is difficult to understand why such large interactions should
occur. If there existed such strong dynamical fluctuations,
one should expect multiphoton ionization as occurs in intense
laser field, but generally no such effects are usually observed.
Consequently, we are motivated to examine the model in order
to better understand the problem.
They conclude that the W-L calculations are based
on certain assumptions that may not hold, they
refer to the W-L work as being "gauge-free." Then,
Of interest was whether the Widom and
Larsen result could be confirmed in a different formalism in
which a specific gauge is specified. Results for observable
quantities must be independent of the choice of gauge in the
case of a complete computation where all effects are taken
into account. It is well known that the choice of gauge can
produce different answers in practical computations where the
computation is approximate, or not complete in this sense
[7, 14]. Since the Coulomb gauge is widely used, we adopted
it for this purpose. We find that the mass shift estimated
using this approach for their example is lower by the fourth
power of the ratio of the proton velocity to the speed of
light. In this example, the Coulomb gauge result is lower
by about 17 orders of magnitude. Since local electrons have
higher velocities, one would expect a much larger electron
electron contribution, especially if a significant current was
present. However, any such effects are trivial in comparison
with Coulomb interactions between electrons and ions that
occur in a metal hydride.
Implication to my simple mind: bogus. But they
then go on to examine the question of whether a
large mass shift can be produced. They conclude
that a small mass shift can be arranged, and that
it should be observable. The bulk of their paper
addresses this. At the end they summarize the first part as:
Our effort was stimulated by the recent publication of Widom
and Larsen who proposed that a large electronmass shift could
be expected to occur near the surface of a metal hydride [13].
These authors were led to this conclusion from a gauge-free
formulation of the mass shift. Since the result is so counter to
our intuition, we decided to investigate an approach based on
the Coulomb gauge. In the end, the key difference is that in
the Coulomb gauge one must use the transverse electric field
fluctuations for a mass shift estimate instead of fluctuations in
the longitudinal field. As a result, the mass shift that we would
expect would be orders of magnitude smaller.
How do W-L respond? The plot thickens.
(i) The error by Hagelstein and Chaudhary in violating the electric Coulomb
law interaction is discussed in detail in Sec.2. However, let us here note
that contrary to the Hagelstein-Chaudhary statement that electron energy
shifts in the MeV energy range are unprecedented, the fact is that electron
energy shifts in the MeV energy range are routinely calculated and measured.
Consider the electric field (~ 102 megavolt per centimeter) within the surface
dipole layer produced when a metal is in contact with an insulator. If
the insulator were to slide across the metal, then the frictional electron
charge transfer at the small regions of contact (total area . to the normal
force) can support charge separation voltage differences as high as ~ ten
megavolts. The resulting established experimental device is a Van de Graaf
Generator and is very well known to produce discharge electron energies
in the nuclear physics MeV range.
This appears to me to be quite deceptive. Again,
W-L are comparing voltage/distance (electric
field gradient) with voltage (potential
difference, i.e., gradient integrated over
distance). On the surface of a metal hydride, we
have the surface of a conductor, and in an
electrolytic cell, we also have a conductive
fluid in which the hydride is immersed. With a
Van de Graaf generator -- I had one of those as a
kid, what fun! -- one can build up a charge in
the Mv range, sure, but the voltage difference at
the belt is nowhere near as high as they claim.
Some insulators have very high breakdown
voltages, as high as a million volts per
millimeter or so for very thin films, and that's
what they mention at first. The "~ ten megavolts"
is the maximum net charge in a very large Van de
Graaf generator, not between the belt and the
rollers, but from the base of the device, perhaps
grounded, to the sphere accumulating the charge.
This has nothing to do with the surface of a metal hydride.
