Casaubon, don't worry about "weak memory", we all have some of these "events". Actually, I think you are absolutely right about fusion being "an activated" process. I calculated once (back of the envelop calculation so do not take it as "fact"), that the energy barrier in the presence of a palladium nucleus to fuse two deuterium nuclei is only about 20 Kev. The reason I am bringing the palladium into play is because that is where my fellow physicists were erring, IMHO, when criticizing Pons and Fleischman some 10 years ago. They were saying that unless you can detect neutrons, there is no way in hell that what they observed was "fusion". But my fellow physicists took the "free space" cross section for the various fusion reactions, and indeed in free space, because of conservation of momentum, the cross section to create helium from two deuterium nuclei is 5 orders of magnitudes lower than those reactions resulting in two particles (a neutron and "something else", typically Li3, or tritium). But in the presence of palladium, the cross section for formation of helium is probably 5 orders of magnitude larger than the other reactions, because the palladium can "take" the excess momentum, and the reaction to helium is the most "energetic" (yielding the highest energy).
Zeev |
