Historical research guide · 0426 · 2007
Deuteron Cluster Fusion and ASH
Akito Takahashi
In one minute
Akito Takahashi, at Osaka University, reviews a decade of his own theory of what happens when deuterium is packed into a metal lattice. The picture is this: at particular focal points inside palladium deuteride, three, four or eight deuterons briefly condense together with their electrons into a tiny symmetric cluster. The electrons in that cluster stop behaving as single particles — they pair up, and pairs of pairs couple again — and the screened potential each deuteron feels deepens enormously, from about 15 electronvolts of screening for an ordinary molecule to 2,460 electronvolts for a four-electron state and 21,000 for an eight-electron one, stronger than a muon. With the repulsion screened that thoroughly the deuterons no longer have to tunnel one pair at a time: several can interact at once. The predicted ash is what experimenters keep reporting — helium-4 tracking the heat, and neutrons about ten billion times rarer than the helium.
Connection
Chapter twelve is about changing the odds a nucleus faces by putting it inside a lattice rather than inside a plasma, and this is the screening side of that argument set out in full: a published mechanism for why the environment, not the temperature, does the work.
From the source
Treating the electrons around a transient deuteron cluster as quasi-particles — a Cooper-like pair, a quadruplet, an octet — gives effective screening energies of about minus 260 electronvolts, minus 2,460 electronvolts and minus 21 kilo-electronvolts, so the quadruplet screens as strongly as a muon and the octet more strongly still.Section 4.2, Table 4; Section 3.4
The screening moves the classical turning point from about 20 picometres for a deuterium molecule to 0.5 picometres for the quadruplet state and 70 femtometres for the octet, raising the two-deuteron barrier factor from ten to the minus fiftieth power to about three times ten to the minus fourth.Section 3.4, Table 1
Under those conditions multi-body channels win: four deuterons in the tetrahedral condensate fuse through an excited beryllium-8 at 47.6 mega-electronvolts into two helium-4 nuclei of 23.8 mega-electronvolts each, and the octahedral eight-deuteron channel emits 47.6 mega-electronvolt beryllium-8 directly.Section 3.5, reactions (3) and (4); Section 4.3, equation (4.6)
Helium-4 is therefore the ash, and neutrons from the ordinary two-deuteron channel come out on the order of ten to the minus tenth of the helium production rate, which is the pattern reported in the electrolysis experiments where heat and helium appear together without countable neutrons.Section 4.3; Conclusions
At a tetrahedral cluster density of about ten to the twenty-second per cubic centimetre the model gives 3 watts per cubic centimetre from four-deuteron fusion with only ten neutrons per second per cubic centimetre, and an octahedral density a million times lower still gives 78 watts per cubic centimetre.Section 4.3, Tables 5 and 6
Beryllium-8 leaving at 47.6 mega-electronvolts clears the 30.1 mega-electronvolt Coulomb barrier of caesium-133, so the model predicts capture reactions that add eight to the mass and four to the charge — strontium-88 to molybdenum-96, caesium-133 to praseodymium-141 — which is the signature the Mitsubishi permeation experiments reported.Section 3.6, equation (3.33); Section 4.4
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72102How to cite it
Akito Takahashi (2007) Deuteron Cluster Fusion and ASH doi:10.70923/001c.72102