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Re: Challenging the laws of physics



Jack Uretsky notes (after I name-dropped my professor, Luis Alvarez):

And I was a post-doc there at the time. There was a Phys Rev paper; two
of the authors, as I recall, were Cohen and Riddell. Dave Judd might also
have been a co-author. We've discussed all this in an earlier posting.

Sorry about that, Jack. I just rejoined the discussion. Incidentally,
David Judd was my optics professor, after I had flunked the course as
taught by Gerson Goldhaber (my fault, not Goldhaber's). On the morning
that I visited Goldhaber's office to ask for an incomplete grade (I
hadn't written up my labs) he was very excited. He told me about what
he had done the previous evening when he got the first antiproton star
ever seen in a nuclear emulsion. That was much more interesting (to me,
too) than my trivial problem.

Those were exciting times, and Berkeley is an exciting place.

and Ludwik Kowalski asked:

Can you remind us essential physics of "catalyzed fusion"
Leigh? Make it as simple as possible. Unfortunately, most
people remember only pseudoscience aspects of the claims
and not the ideas on which they were based. These ideas
were taken seriously by many, at least for a short time.

Turn a negative muon loose in a bucket of deuterium and it will quickly
bind to a deuteron, displacing that deuteron's orbital electron. This
happens because the muon is more massive than the electron and so has a
smaller ground state orbital. This much smaller "muonic atom" now gets
much closer to another, normal, deuterium nucleus than would another
normal deuterium atom. The consequent electrostatic potential
barrier between deuterons is greatly reduced, and fusion can occur with
higher probability at lower temperatures than those usually required
for deuteron-deuteron fusion. (At the temperatures required for this
ordinary, uncatalyzed fusion the deuterons do not even have electrons
to help them get close - they are completely ionized.) Once a fusion
has occurred the negative muon wanders promiscuously about in the
deuterium until it finds another happily bonded deuterium atom to
disrupt, and seduces the deuteron to its destruction. Thus one muon can
participate in the fusion of more than one pair of deuterons. That is
a catalytic process. The catalytic agent survives the fusion reaction
and lives to participate in successive reactions.

The limitation on this catalysis is, of course, the finite life of the
muon, about two microseconds. While long by nuclear standards, this
lifetime is too short to make the process economical. The best that can
be expected (this from fallible memory) is of the order of 100 fusions
per muon. Of course there are variables to tune (e.g. density) and
other, related reactions to consider (e.g. muon catalyzed deuterium-
tritium fusion), but so far no one has made an IPO on this phenomenon,
or at least not one that I would buy.

Leigh