9 thoughts on “Controlled Electron Capture Reaction Model”

1. AlainCo March 17, 2016 at 10:42 am

   You make many good points.
   Globally most theories concentrate too much in explaining the fusion, not explaining the lack of energetic outcome of any kind, except infinitesimal neutrons, and rare tritium.

   Edmund Storm in “The Explanation of LENR ” start by criticizing most theories like you do, eliminating all proposition.
   There cannot be neutrons, even ULM, because even if rare, few of them will be thermalized, at probablility much above 10e-12.

   His proposition is interesting, even if there is also hard critics.
   I prefer his approach to any other anyway.

   The observation is that infinitesimal neutrons are produced, (1e-12) and rare tritium (1e-6), saying it is not the usual split of excited He4 d+d->he4*->t+n

   more amazing si tha clear preference to non radioactive outcome, like noticed by Iwamura, noticing 2k.D+X ->Y happens only when Y is stable for k=1, or 2 or 3
   many other observations, beside some rare fission event, show that outcome are quite stable.

   the mechanism of LENR not only allow fusion to appear at reasonable probability despire ridiculous average energy, but also produce low energy outcome.

   Edmund Storms then propose that the fusion is not a short even but a slow process.

   I woul propose the metaphore :

   Hot fusion is like sending B52 inside a skyscraper, making it fall to a lower stable state

   most proposed LENr theory are like smuggling C4 inside the basement, plaing it on the key pilars, and triggering the collapse of the building from it’s own potential energy

   LENR as Ed proposes is like deconstructing the building brick by brick, until it is at it’s minimal energy state.

   To explain that, ed imagine a collective process.

   He propose first that the NAE is an object which is insulated from chemistry context (in a crack … why not), and which is strongly coherent, coupled… He propose hydroton, a dense linear from of hydrogen…
   I’m afraid he is wrong, even if there is no better proposal today.

   this hydroton , insulated, should exhibit a complex scale of energy level, whose transition are in the keV range. The transitions are a bit of nuclear-isomeric transitions, but at a huge scale which is unbelievable. This demand an intearaction between nucleus along the linear chain (or whatever structure of the NAE)…
   This is where the physicist should work. is it ponderomotive force like what says lidgren, discrete breather like say Dubinko, evanescent field like Srivastava/Widom… or something new…

   when this NAE is created, like an atom in an excited state it will emit energy until it is at the lowest energy (very stable, surprisingly stable and necessarily stable, unlike others few-body nuclear reaction), or when the NAE is destroyed (forcing decoherence and an improbable outcome, maybe radioactive, observed when the reaction is not so well controlled)

   the behavior of LENr match well this idea, absed on collective effect, leading to low energy outcome preference.

   LENR cannot be a few body reaction, or it shoul exhibit high energy particle. it is a collective effect and we have not much experience in that in particle physics in 2016.

   Better is to forget any theory that don’t involve a collective effect. it would produce energetic gamma, neutrons, or charged particles, that would be detected and are not.

   Better is also to focus on the outcome, and less on the ignition.

   there is many ways to make a skyscraper collapse, but very few can do it without creating an earthquake and a cloud of dust.

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2. Robert Godes July 17, 2016 at 6:30 pm

   As the author of CECR I would like to offer incite to all of the misunderstandings expressed in this post.

   The author states “(Hagelstein was investigating something different, found that it could only happen if several MeV could be localized, and finds this so implausible that he considers it a proof that this scenario will not occur!)”
   They clearly did not go all the way to page 25. In the CECR hypothesis I clearly state “In the second paragraph of page 25 he states “The result of the analysis indicates that the localization energy associated with a compact state is several MeV”” However just before that quote Peter states “Of interest here is that we are able to apply the lattice resonating group method now directly to this kind of problem, and develop quantitative results.” Those results are ” the localization energy associated with a compact state is several MeV”. Peter is disappointed that it does not lead to a stabilized system, but an electron capture vent would happen before that point any how.
   The author states
   “Beta decays of Hydrogen-4 (Secs. 2.2-2.3)
   Since I don’t believe hydrogen-4 could possibly be created (if it even exists), I don’t see any reason to discuss this topic. A little tip — Section 2.3 is a paper excerpt, it’s not written by Godes. I was confused by that at first.”
   My intention is not to be rude by what you personally believe is rather irrelevant. One can easily find data on hydrogen-4, hydrogen-5, hydrogen-6, and even hydrogen-7 now at http://www.nndc.bnl.gov.
   At the bottom of the page is the statement “This data sheet maybe retrieved from the NNDC at http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/ensdf/ in the box for “Retrieve all ENSDF datasets for a given nuclide or mass:” enter 4H. Click on the “Search” button. On the next page select the check box and click the HTML button.” in the same type face as the rest of the paper, not even fine print.
   As to your comments about “Quantum compression, skin effect (Secs. 2.8-2.9)”
   Do you even understand the concept of a Hamiltonian? This seems inconceivable to me given what you do for a living. Perhaps it has just been to long since you really thought about what a Hamiltonian really represents. Clearly as a physicist currently working on precision optical systems and matter-wave interferometry at Draper you have some notion.
   As to your musing about “Heisenberg Confinement Energy (Sec. 2.11)”
   Also relating to #3 above, your statement “If I understand correctly, Godes believes that the confinement of a proton in a box is the source for the huge 0.782MeV of kinetic energy that we would need to form a neutron by electron capture. (Or the 3MeV to turn a deuteron into a “di-neutron” etc.)” would seem to indicate you do not understand the concept of Hamiltonian. A Hamiltonian is the operator corresponding to the total energy of the system, IE collective action. This means all 7 components discussed in the CECR hypothesis. Don’t worry, you are actually in good company. The people at PNNL said the same thing when I landed a TAP with them through one of my technical advisers. They said that just driving the Heisenberg Confinement Energy to extremes would not cause the formation of a neutron. However when they simulated just that bit it actually did form neutrons. As far as collective action you might read http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/einsteins-lost-hypothesis. In this doccument you will find
   “In a letter to Einstein dated Aug. 26, 1951, Sternglass wrote, “You may be interested to learn that in the course of the past two months, I have been able to obtain experimental evidence for the formation of neutrons from protons and electrons in high-voltage hydrogen discharge.” … There was no known way that an electron beam of the energies he was studying (about 35,000 electron Volts) could have induced any radioactivity in the foils. Nevertheless, time and again, that is what he observed. When he ran a control experiment with the beam passing through regular air, the foils did not become radioactive. … “I should expect to observe a decay lasting of the order of 3-4 minutes,” Sternglass wrote in his lab notebook. He’d seen just that. His silver foil was acting precisely as if it’d been bombarded by low-energy neutrons. … The scientific literature, too, seemed to support him. J.J. Thomson—Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of the electron—had reported a similar finding in 1914. … in a letter dated Aug. 30, 1951, Einstein wrote two sentences that were as insightful as any idea he had formulated in his postwar years at Princeton. “Perhaps reactions occur in which multiple electrons simultaneously transfer energy to one proton,” Einstein wrote (his emphasis). … it is worth pointing out that a colleague of his at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory had been able to reproduce his data in 1953”
   In response to “To close out the section”. Perhaps you would prefer I left out that the words “electron wave functions” in the last paragraph of that section, however it does result in adjacent lattice elements being forced closer together. Perhaps that is not obvious to you but if you actually think about it, it makes sense.
   In your assessment of (Sec. 2.13) you state “He proposes that the energy is released in the beta decay of hydrogen-4 into helium-4. That would mean, specifically, that each nuclear reaction creates an electron with kinetic energy ~27MeV, i.e. traveling 99.98% the speed of light.”
   That is your presumption not my assertion. If you had bothered to actually read the entire section you could not have missed “In the process of Beta Decay, that nucleon charge is restored to the system. The appearance of the positive charge in the molecular system is accompanied by the prompt increase of Non-bonding energy component of the Molecular Hamiltonian. This results in phonons that transfer the energy to the lattice.” However as many people who think they can ignore reality, you refuse to see any information that does not adhere to your existing viewpoint.

   I would be happy to discuss this further with you.

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   1. steve Post authorJuly 26, 2016 at 11:52 pm

      Dear Mr. Godes, thank you for joining us!

      The author states… “Since I don’t believe hydrogen-4 could possibly be created (if it even exists), I don’t see any reason to discuss this topic…” My intention is not to be rude by what you personally believe is rather irrelevant. One can easily find data on hydrogen-4, hydrogen-5, hydrogen-6, and even hydrogen-7…

      I think you misunderstood my statement “I don’t believe hydrogen-4 could possibly be created…”. I should have added “…in the kind of apparatus we’re talking about”. I was (and am) open-minded to the possibility that hydrogen-4 could be made in, say, a cyclotron or other normal particle accelerator.

      OK, I just looked into it a bit. As far as I can tell, yes you can make hydrogen-4 in a particle accelerator. It is very unstable (lifetime is maybe ~10-21 seconds). And then it seems to always decay to tritium+neutron. The beta decay to helium-4 which you propose has never been observed. That doesn’t prove that the beta decay is impossible of course. But we can estimate how likely it is. Here goes. Since “beta-decay half-lives are never shorter than a few milliseconds”, we can compare that to ~10-21 seconds, in order to estimate that a hydrogen-4 nucleus has maybe 1-in-1018 (0.0000000000000001%) chance of beta-decaying, as opposed to losing a neutron. That by itself pretty much rules out your theory, in my opinion. (Refs I looked at: A , B) (retracted, see later comments)

      As to your comments about “Quantum compression, skin effect (Secs. 2.8-2.9)” Do you even understand the concept of a Hamiltonian? This seems inconceivable to me given what you do for a living. Perhaps it has just been to long since you really thought about what a Hamiltonian really represents.

      Yes, I know what a Hamiltonian is. To review, I was saying that the following statement is not justified in detail: “This momentum transfer between conducting electrons and core, drive the values of the evaluated Hamiltonian to the magnitude required for capture events.” Well, what would a detailed justification look like? I am not asking you to explain what a Hamiltonian is! I am asking you to do a calculation which estimates the momentum transfer between conducting electrons and core, and compares the resulting numbers to the criteria for capture events. For example, I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation**, and found that with 2000A/mm2 going through a 0.05mm-diameter Pd wire, the average electron’s drift velocity is a liesurely 0.2m/s or so. Totally negligible. If that’s the starting point, I don’t see how you can wind up with a huge momentum transfer and then with electrons accumulating MeV’s of energy. That’s why I don’t believe your statement (the one I copied above). But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you have in mind. So, you should write down the calculation that justifies your assertion.

      your statement … would seem to indicate you do not understand the concept of Hamiltonian. A Hamiltonian is the operator corresponding to the total energy of the system, IE collective action.

      I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Every physical system has a Hamiltonian, but not every physical system has “collective action”, unless you’re using the term in a very broad sense. How do you define “collective action”?

      I do object to the idea that, say, a million electrons might spontaneously simultaneously give most of their thermal energy to a single electron, because that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Do you agree? (And would you refer to this as “collective action”?)

      When I read your document, I got the impression that the Heisenberg confinement energy is the source for the 0.782MeV of kinetic energy. Is that correct or incorrect? If that’s not the source, then where does the 0.782MeV come from?

      In your assessment of (Sec. 2.13) you state “He proposes that the energy is released in the beta decay of hydrogen-4 into helium-4. That would mean, specifically, that each nuclear reaction creates an electron with kinetic energy ~27MeV, i.e. traveling 99.98% the speed of light.” That is your presumption not my assertion. If you had bothered to actually read the entire section you could not have missed “In the process of Beta Decay, that nucleon charge is restored to the system. The appearance of the positive charge in the molecular system is accompanied by the prompt increase of Non-bonding energy component of the Molecular Hamiltonian. This results in phonons that transfer the energy to the lattice.”

      Here is what I think you’re saying, in my own words. When the hydrogen-4 beta-decays to helium-4, the helium-4 left behind is positively-charged. This pushes and pulls on the neighboring atoms, sending out phonons. If that’s what you’re saying, I agree. But it is very few phonons carrying very little energy, a negligible fraction of the total.

      Think about relativistic causality. Atoms can have a long half-life, but once beta decay is happening, the process is very very fast. The W boson blinks in and out of existence much faster than (inter-atomic spacing) / (speed of light). Since information cannot travel faster than light, long before the other atoms know that anything is going on, let alone move in response, the electron and neutrino have already been created and the energy has already been divvied up, with the electron flying away near the speed of light. After that, of course some of the energy of the electron and recoiling atom will turn into phonons, as described by standard SRIM physics. But not much energy.

      Or here’s another perspective. There is a simple experiment, where you take a solid that has some beta-decaying nuclei in it, and you measure the energy distribution of the ejected electrons. Mainstream physicists have done this measurement countless times since the 1940s. It is even repeated year after year in student lab classes like this one. The results are consistent with conventional theory: The energy is shared by the electron, the neutrino, and the recoiling atom, in a way that is well understood and described in textbooks. You talked about how the nucleon charge alters during the decay, etc. That should be true in any solid. Why does conventional theory work perfectly in countless measurements across 70 years, but is dramatically wrong (according to you) in this particular system?

      [**My back-of-envelope calculation: I estimate that the skin effect makes little or no difference for a 40ns pulse down a 0.05mm Pd wire. The wire is so thin that it’s all skin, more or less. That’s based on this page. Next, suppose conservatively that there is only 1 conduction electron per atom (it might be more, I didn’t check). Then that’s 7×1022 electrons / cm3. Finally, 2000A/mm2 / (7×1022 electrons / cm3) = 0.2m/s.]

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3. Patrick Tremblay October 30, 2016 at 7:40 pm

   “Heisenberg Confinement Energy (Sec. 2.11)

   The basic idea is that if you put a particle in a smaller and smaller box, its position becomes more and more certain, which means (by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) its momentum becomes more and more uncertain, and the expectation value of kinetic energy increases. Godes calls it “Heisenberg confinement energy”, but it’s ultimately a form of kinetic energy, so I’ll call it that.

   So far, this is true.”

   How about testing the implosion with high explosive lenses of a Palladium sphere saturated with Deuterium and Tritium ?

   Just like the Fatman bomb but you replace the plutonium pit with a D+T saturated Palladium pit.

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   1. Robert Godes January 13, 2017 at 3:10 pm

      You need only H and or D. Also the T1/2 of 4H formed is 0.03 sec and will not cause an explosion. Think about the size of a proton. ~0.00001A. If you confine that proton to a box 0.009A the energy of that proton is ~782KeV. This is what PNNL determined and that it would spontaneously undergo an electron capture event! At exactly that size of confinement the resulting neutron would have an energy level approaching zero. A neutron at 10^-12eV is only moving at ~1cm/sec giving it an enormous cross section that will bind to other H ions that move into the location that no longer has a column barrier to access of that location. As to the issue of beta decay, according to the authors of the paper A=4
      ——– Forwarded Message ——–
      Subject: Re: 4H
      Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 17:05:42 -0500 (EST)
      From: Ron Tilley
      To: Robert E. Godes

      Dear Dr. Godes,

      Yes, it would be β¯ decay to 4He.

      -Ron Tilley

      e

      On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, Robert E. Godes wrote:

      > Dear Dr. Tilly,
      > When it does decay under those conditions, the decay should be β¯ decay?
      >
      > Best regards,
      >
      > Robert E. Godes
      > President and Chief Technology Officer
      > Brillouin Energy Corp.

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      1. steve Post authorJanuary 14, 2017 at 7:01 pm

         Dear Mr. Godes, That’s an interesting conversation with Ron Tilley, but you left out the previous context for the statement “When it does decay under those conditions…”, What is the antecedent for “it” and “those conditions”? (For example, can you please post the previous emails too?) Also, when you say “the T1/2 of 4H formed is 0.03 sec”, where did you learn that? Thanks in advance, –Steve

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      2. Robert Godes October 17, 2018 at 10:54 pm

         Someone just asked me today 10-17-2018 about this article. Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. The “those conditions” are forming below 3MeV energy level. Now further refined to 3.53MeV) If you go to http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/ensdf/ and enter 4H. click search and read the pdf of the results. This has been updated and is now easier to read. Also the error I pointed out and mentioned below has been corrected.
         On 2/20/2009 12:44 PM, Ron Tilley wrote:
         > Dear Dr. Godes,
         >
         > I did retrieve the publication 1965BA1A and am looking at their discussion. Before trying to answer your question about the possible decay of 4H produced by the accumulation of cold to ultra cold neutrons onto a Hydrogen ion, I wanted to discuss it with my colleague Henry Weller. He was in California all week, but will be back Monday. We agreed to discuss the question on Tuesday, and I will be in touch with you afterwards.
         >
         > Best regards,
         > Ron Tilley
         >
         >
         > On Fri, 20 Feb 2009, Robert E. Godes wrote:
         >
         >> Dear Dr. Tilley,
         >> Wondering if you have had a chance to evaluate the Russian publication 1965BA1A.
         >>
         >> Best regards,
         >>
         >> Robert E. Godes
         >> President and Chief Technology Officer
         >> Brillouin Energy Corp.
         >> (510) 821-1432
         >>
         >>
         >>
         >> Ron Tilley wrote:
         >> Dear Dr. Godes,
         >>
         >> Sorry that I did not answer your 2/6/09 message before now, but I was out of town for a couple
         >> of days. On looking at your message:
         >>
         >> 1. I agree about the misprint in the A = 4 ensdf evaluation. I am pretty sure that my colleague,
         >> Dr. John Kelley can get that fixed. I’ll talk with him.
         >>
         >> 2. I need to look up the Russian publication 1965BA1A and get back to you.
         >>
         >>
         >> I’ll be in touch with you soon.
         >>
         >> Thanks,
         >> -Ron Tilley
         >>
         =========================================================
         On 2/26/2009 3:06 PM, Ron Tilley wrote:
         >
         >
         > Dear Dr. Godes,
         >
         > My colleague, Dr. Henry Weller, and I studied the Russian Publication 1965BA1A, and our interpretation is that the lifetime of 4H (if it can be formed) should be greater than or equal to – approximately 10 minutes for a negative parity state, or 0.03 sec for a positive parity state. We don’t think that the Russian’s are saying that the 4H would necessarily decay with those lifetimes.
         >
         > Thank you for the inquiry. Please let us know if you have further questions.
         >
         > -Ron Tilley
         >
         NOTE: we have now also received to independent verification of our experimental results by SRI. This is the link to the second one that shows 2 to 3 times more energy produced than in the 2016/17 report. http://brillouinenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Brillouin-SRI-Technical-Report-News-Release-Final-3-13-18.pdf

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      3. steve Post authorOctober 18, 2018 at 10:53 pm

         Thanks! I wrote above, “As far as I can tell … hydrogen-4 … is very unstable (lifetime is maybe ~10^-21 seconds)…” Now, after reading what you posted and the various references, I’m thinking that I was wrong in writing that. There is indeed a known hydrogen-4 state that decays in 10^-21-seconds, but that might not be the ground state! There is at least a theoretical possibility of a lower-energy hydrogen-4 state that can survive for minutes and then beta-decay. Such a state has never been observed in particle accelerators or other mainstream nuclear physics experiments … but sure, it might exist. So I retract the paragraph of my comment above starting “OK, I just looked into it a bit…” I still stand by everything else I wrote.

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4. Anthony Dean June 5, 2017 at 12:52 pm

   I have an idea how this could work, for electron capture you need 782KeV, however if the electron or proton is interacted on by a Z boson it would get an extra 90GeV which is more than enough to make the neutron possibly with the release of a W boson so we end up making a neutron and emiting the electron back out with an anti-neutrino. I.e. just using the W and Z mechanisms for moomentum transfer.

   Where does this Z boson come from, I think dark matter (which is evaporating and trying to get rid of momentum from the parallel universe opposite to our own, which is why we can’t see it as its always behind us and it is also the reason our universe is expanding while its universe is contracting). So our sun (a proton star) needs a dark matter neutron star on the opposite side and vice versa.

   I have made an image to try and show how momentum could be transfered mass to mass (via a singularity 0 point) and energy to energy (via the singularity shell beyond infinity). Dark energy and light are the same things just travelling in opposite directions relative, i.e. dark energy is travelling from -infinity to 0 and light 0 to +infinity, but both are the same photons. Dark energy therefor is all the light emit from proton stars since the big bang.

   

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