On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:36 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
Remember that this is a hypothesis and the coupling between a significant > number of protons has not been proven. Also, it needs to be shown that the > gamma ray that is typically released at the moment that the proton enters > the nucleus originates from the acceleration of that proton and not some > other mechanism. > We know that gammas are emitted by nuclei in other contexts, such as that of a metastable isomer. Such an isomer will give off a gamma at some point uncorrelated with a scattering event. The explanation I have read is that the nucleons are settling into a more stable arrangement. The image I have in my mind is of very dense, heavy magnets screeching a little as they snap into a more stable configuration. Given that metastable isomers emit gammas at the rate of some half life, I see no problem with a similar phenomenon happening at the moment of a fusion event. I have not read anything about protons giving off electromagnetic radiation, although I have wondered about it, in light of the usual explanation that EM radiation has its origin in the acceleration of electrostatically charged particles. I wonder if that explanation is a convenient approximation. In my reading so far I have only seen EM radiation come from electrons and nuclei. About attenuation, I've been wondering how to get from 8 MeV or something in this range to the 50 to 100 keV that Andrea Rossi mentioned to the government employee in Florida (I'm just using his numbers as a representative example). I'm hoping to figure out how EM radiation at these lower energies might be fed into a self-sustaining thermodynamic system that yields energy primarily in the form of soft x-rays and EUV. For my own thinking I am currently exploring conventional reactions such as 2p -> 2He -> 2H + e+ + v. Note that 50 to 100 keV are hard x-rays. If this is a characteristic range, I do not imagine that you would want to keep an unshielded LENR reactor in your closet. I am optimistic about the attenuation problem; this might be due to having recently read enough phys.org articles to appreciate that there are some truly weird electromagnetic phenomena, especially at the quantum level. Microwaves on the order of 12cm cause a resonance in tiny water molecules. Lightening gives rise to EM radiation in the range of 10 to 500 Hz, at wavelengths of 30,000 to 600 km. And nano-sized electric components emit radio-frequency signals. I am hoping there might be some similar weirdness in reverse, such that a fusion event can be coerced into releasing lower-frequency radiation, or its byproducts can be safely wound down. There is a field called nonlinear optics, which includes a number of interesting leads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_electrodynamics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_parametric_down_conversion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodyne#Optical_heterodyning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_amplification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulational_instability I imagine that it is unlikely given the relative sizes involved, but there might even be some kind of gamma ray optics going on. I don't know about the proton ensemble. Do protons ever act in concert like that outside of a nucleus? Do they emit radiation? Eric
