Historical research guide · 0603 · 2005
Mechanism of deuteron cluster fusion by EQPET model
Akito Takahashi
In one minute
Akito Takahashi, at Osaka University, is answering the hardest question in the field: how could deuterium nuclei fuse inside a palladium lattice at room temperature, when the electrical repulsion between them is enormous? His answer is that they do not go one pair at a time. When the lattice is shaken hard enough, four deuterons drop inward from their usual sites toward a single point, carrying four electrons with them from palladium’s outer shell. Pauli’s rule forces those electrons to pair up, and the paired-up group behaves as one heavy quasi-particle that screens the repulsion far better than an ordinary electron can — about as well as a muon, the particle already known to catalyse fusion. Takahashi computes the resulting rates. Four-deuteron fusion becomes the main channel, producing helium-4 and heat at watts per cubic centimetre, while the ordinary two-deuteron channel that makes neutrons runs ten to twelve orders of magnitude slower. That is exactly the pattern the experiments report.
Connection
Chapter 12 is the claim that the environment around a nucleus, not the temperature of a plasma, can change what nuclei do — and this is that claim written as arithmetic, with a screening mechanism, a barrier factor and a predicted ash. It also matters to chapter 1, because the model’s sharpest output is a checkable ratio: helium-4 with heat and almost no neutrons, which is what the electrolysis experiments had been reporting for a decade without a mechanism to explain it.
From the source
Under deuterium phonon excitation in a fully loaded palladium deuteride lattice, four deuterons squeeze inward from octahedral sites toward a central tetrahedral site while carrying four electrons from palladium’s 4d shell, and the fermion nature of those electrons forces them into paired states — a transient Bose-type condensation the author calls tetrahedral symmetric condensation.Section 2, Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensation, Figures 1 and 2
The four paired electrons act as a single quadruplet quasi-particle, and the screening it provides is dramatic: the distance at which the screened potential crosses zero falls from 20 picometres for an ordinary deuterium molecule to 4 picometres for a Cooper-like pair and 0.45 picometres for the quadruplet, with a potential well about 2.4 kilo-electronvolts deep, and to about 60 femtometres for the eight-electron state — screening comparable to that of a muon of 207 electron masses.Section 3, Super Screening by TEQP; Figures 6 and 7
The barrier factor for two deuterons rises from ten to the minus 1685 with no screening, to ten to the minus 125 with a normal electron, to ten to the minus 7 with a Cooper-like pair; with the quadruplet the four-deuteron process reaches a barrier factor of ten to the minus 7 and a microscopic fusion rate of ten to the minus 9 fusions per second per cluster.Section 3, Table 1, calculated barrier factors and microscopic fusion rates at Ed equal to 0.22 electronvolts
Weighting those states by their quantum-mechanical formation probabilities gives modal fusion rates of 3.1 times ten to the minus 11 per second per cluster for the four-deuteron channel under tetrahedral condensation and 7.8 times ten to the minus 4 for the eight-deuteron channel under octahedral condensation; at a cluster density of ten to the twenty-second per cubic centimetre that is about 3 watts per cubic centimetre, and one part per million of over-loaded lattice in the octahedral case gives 78 watts per cubic centimetre.Section 4, Modal Fusion Rates, Table 2 and the numerical estimates that follow it
The predicted signature is the one the experiments report: helium-4 produced with the heat, tritium and helium-3 from the three-deuteron channel at about 1.6 times ten to the eighth per second per cubic centimetre, and neutrons from the ordinary two-deuteron channel at only about 10 per second per cubic centimetre — ten to twelve or more orders of magnitude below the helium production rate, and therefore hardly visible to a conventional neutron detector.Section 4, closing paragraphs; Section 5, Concluding Remarks
Beryllium-8 leaving the eight-deuteron channel at 47.6 mega-electronvolts lives only 1.6 times ten to the minus 17 seconds but travels far enough to capture on host or sample elements first, adding eight to the mass and four to the charge; and 23.8 mega-electronvolt alpha particles from the four-deuteron channel clear palladium’s roughly 10 mega-electronvolt barrier and add four to the mass and two to the charge — which is the transmutation pattern reported by Iwamura, Karabut and Mizuno.Section 4, final two paragraphs; references 8, 9 and 10
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812701510_0074How to cite it
Akito Takahashi (2005) Mechanism of deuteron cluster fusion by EQPET model doi:10.1142/9789812701510_0074