Right. When a positive charged particle (assumed here) strikes something, it can at most strip an innermost electron (or more) and create a characteristic line from that, and extremely rarely make a near-full energy photon by direct braking radiation if it happens to (almost) hit a target nucleus head on, which would be a much more rare case if all I know is true. But this isn't rare, it's practically swamping the detectors!
Due to conservation of energy and momentum, and the low input energy (which can almost be neglected here compared to that of a fusion) we assume that the fusion products take on energies in relation to their weight, with momentum being conserved by giving more energy/velocity to the lighter fragments. What little data I have (and I'll have to go fish through it all again, and could use help, most of it is here) seems to say that. So when you have a light and a heavy product, both get the same momentum to conserve that, but the light one gets most of the fusion energy as velocity to make all the conservation laws happy, is what things boil down to if I understand correctly.
We know from both theory and practice that with 50kv power supply and some non fusing gas in there, that at most we get 50kev photons out from electrons hitting the tank walls, and we actually get a continuum from there down to zero, with some peaks at the K,L,M lines of the substances involved -- just as the books say. I've found no exceptions in the literature so far to that, or in practice here. You get the K,L,M etc lines and some in-between, and at the Z's of the components in the tank metal and lead, the K line (hottest) isn't high enough to explain what we see. By quite a lot!
Therefore, it becomes hard to explain these very hot gammas. I have tried this with a piece of lead that should stop nearly all gammas under 100kv (according to the radiology safety charts published elsewhere here), and we still see stuff getting through the lead -- lots of it, which kind of eliminates some of the questions about the detectors. Now, whether that's neutrons, which we know get through the lead at some level creating scintillation light in NaI, we can't be very sure at this point, but in general NaI isn't very neutron sensitive (no light atoms in there other than maybe in the glue that holds it together) except for activation of the I, and so far I'm not seeing that -- that would produce a very long tail after shutting down -- long half life, and I don't see it yet.
Further, a direct hit of a 2 mev neutron on an atom in the scintillator should not produce 2 mev worth of excitation, due to the conservation of momentum when something light hits something heavy - the neutron should glance off with most of its energy retained when striking something much heavier. Yet we're seeing a lot of 1-2 mev.
I would tend to believe that we're not seeing the about 16 mev gamma which the very rare straight to He reaction produces (total energy is 22 mev for that but some stays in the product, again due to momentum conservation), I'd think that would really stand out, even assuming some output energy compression due to limits in the NaI. What we see instead is a lot of 1-2 mev or so energy -- and it's really a lot, far too much to explain by almost head on collisions with target nuclei, which should be relatively rare due to the very small sizes involved vs the spacings of nuclei in solids. That cross section should be really tiny.
As to the time variation...I don't think anyone has an explanation of any variation. All the literature I have seen simply says you get this much percent of this or that reaction pathway, but all this data is from thermal conditions. We don't have pure-thermal conditions, we're in a new world. I can hazard a guess or few, but that's all they'd be -- guesses.
Here's one I've discussed with CurtisF a long while back.
Lets suppose it matters what the instantaneous relative orientations of the D nuclei is a the time of tunneling into fusion matters. There is an orientation as there are two nucleons in a D ion.
Think of it as a little dumbbell. It can therefore come in proton first, neutron first, or anywhere in between -- sideways with the protons at the same ends, crossed, protons at opposite ends, anything you can do with two dumbbells. It can spin around the virtual center of mass between the two nucleons. It can have oscillations in length. I'd suppose the net spin (in terms of the physics definition of spin a single particle can have) of any D is zero (from NMR science), but that this could be created by the proton or the neutron being "spin up" and the other "spin down" as well. If I've read correctly, all these sorts of things are quantized (eigenvalue states) but even l==1 implies that this is happening very fast, well above GHz for the lowest level, much faster than anything we're doing here. It seems reasonable that the relative orientation of all these things would affect probabilities of fusion at all, and relative probabilities of which reaction path we get. I would imagine without actually running the numbers, that any of these rotations happen "zillions" of times during the flight of any ion in our setup, but that their state when in close proximity does matter, and that somehow we are creating conditions where a bunch of them are either this way, or that way relative to one another at the point of closest approach, which is at least possible even though the highest frequencies of any noise we see barely makes it to VHF, much less tera-hz and beyond. In fact, I'd guess the basic energy levels involved in the stretch mode of the dumb-bell is on the order of the stripping energy -- a couple mev, so we are most likely not exciting that directly, unless we have a situation where that's a high quantum number and we can have excitations that are sub-multiples of that (possible).
There are other things in nature where pumping at some sub-multiple (sub harmonic) of something will up-shift the energy -- think for example of frequency doubling in some non linear crystals used to make green laser pointers with an IR laser diode. There are many other examples at lower frequencies in electronics. There are also examples of multi-photon absorption leading to output energies that are higher than any single input energy event. They are not common, however, and usually take very high fluxes of whatever to get a multiple absorption before the effects of the first one decay back to the ground state, and as far as I know, we don't have a fluxes of that level -- in the laser biz it tends to take super high energy densities that are usually prefixed by "tera" or bigger implied exponents yet.
This is a possible mechanism, but frankly, it falls into the realm of gassing about cosmology over beer and pizza (a fun game since no one can go out there and make measurements that prove you wrong, but not terribly useful) -- I'm not claiming I understand what's going on in there well enough to make even an enlightened guess here - other than we DO see an effect (and will take much more data to see what else we can learn about it) so something has to be happening -- the trick is fitting into things we already know are true in nuclear physics, which is what the above is a perhaps weak attempt to do.
The above has far too many "ifs" in it to make me happy. What I want to find is "what" and "why" and "can I make it do this on purpose". Because it's truly new science if it's not just instrumental artifact and would have applications in a lot of fields besides this, and be perhaps one of the first tie-ins of detailed quantum effects in nuclear interactions where a classical model (orientation/frequency/phase) rather than a pure probability has been seen -- we ARE at the right size/energy scales for that sort of thing. It would imply the ability to do things with the strong force from a more macroscopic scale, by pre-polarizing things at a distance, so they are "in phase" in some sense when they get close enough for the strong force to act.
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There has to be some explanation after all. I'd prefer one that didn't involve, you know, magic, spirits, or something else completely off the wall, and this was the best we could do without invoking things like that, perhaps due to our limited ability to imagine. That's where everyone else here is supposed to come in -- we might have missed something that seems obvious to someone else, and this is where "many eyes" often make breakthroughs. I kind of doubt we need string theory or much of anything outside the standard model here -- just a more insightful interpretation of the existing math should do (a guess, but this is the kind of guess I'm good at).
So, here we are facing the unexpected, and tantalized by the fact that this implies there's something we don't know that might help a heck of a lot if we did understand it better.
We have that contaminated petri dish culture with the strange organism that is affecting the ones we wanted to grow, just as in the discovery of penicillin. Now, it's on us to figure out what we have, and try to make some good out of it, rather than throw the thing in the garbage and fire the sloppy lab assistant that didn't ensure the culture was pure.
Obviously, I need to take more data, and I encourage anyone else out there with a fusor to take a look at this too. Perhaps one of will notice something I haven't yet. There's really only two places this can go -- a big "DUH" moment, or we've just hit a jackpot, and one that goes beyond just the ability to control fusion reactions better. Obviously, time will tell, but I'm the impatient sort so I'd like it to tell soonest. If we can get nature to do this more or less by lucky accident, then the possibilities with some "malice aforethought" seem pretty wonderful.