Overcoming the obstacles to achieving unity- removal of He3 nuclei.

[Linda Haile]

Walter, firstly protons are hydrogen nuclei, not alpha particles (helium nuclei)

Secondly, pions are produced by firing very high energy protons through a 10mm piece of carbon in an ultra high vacuum and only 10%, if I remember correctly, spall pions, which decay into muons. The rest go straight through.

The energies required to run a synchotron would, I assume, be greater than any energy produced by muon catalyzed fusion. (I won't attempt the maths, although each muon would theoretically be able to catalyze many many fusion events before it decays, something like a few tens of nanoseconds if I remember correctly)

[walter_b_marvin]

1) I appreciate a good review
2) Many of my comments were qualitative, not quantative
3) Ok muon and cold fusion as envisioned as the original "Cold Fusion" investigation may be different things. This is mostly a semantic difference. Learn from Beck. Get some charity
4) Collision probality and "Density" are for practical purposes the same thing. This is basically a semanic difference.
5r) I am obviously not a fusion expert. I was refering to the FACT that our sun does a very slow burn. If I got some facts wrong I appolize, I was making just off the cuff comments, not preparing a paper for a scientific journal. What I am is a damn good systems designer, with a BS in physics. I will learn.
6) I did not propose two electrodes and DC only. I think I also mentioned an ion gun as a starting place
7) If the commentor does not open his mind to possibilities I agree he never will achieve fusion. That doesn't mean others might not. I think the commentor is trying to prove a negative by induction. Doesn't work. Edison (yep he was no Tesla) worked through 1000s of light bulb filliaments.
8) The commentor did not actually answer my question. What about muon injection into a fusor?

[Chris Bradley]

walter_b_marvin wrote:
> 1) I appreciate a good review
> 2) Many of my comments were qualitative, not quantative
Don't be disheartened. I am trying to encouraging some reading and self-directed learning. If I thought you didn't care, I wouldn't bother replying.


> 3) Ok muon and cold fusion as envisioned as the original "Cold Fusion" investigation may be different things. This is mostly a semantic difference. Learn from Beck. Get some charity
No semantics here, there is a clear difference. Muon fusion never came under the collective term 'cold fusion' to my knowledge, except perhaps in occasional misinformed articles in the popular media. On charity, it looks like my capacity for charity is like your background reading; a bit thin.


> 4) Collision probality and "Density" are for practical purposes the same thing. This is basically a semanic difference.
Not really. Please state the density of a proton. If you have two protons heading towards each other, how would you go about deriving their probability of fusion from their density...?


> 5r) I am obviously not a fusion expert. I was refering to the FACT that our sun does a very slow burn. If I got some facts wrong I appolize, I was making just off the cuff comments, not preparing a paper for a scientific journal. What I am is a damn good systems designer, with a BS in physics. I will learn.
No one here claims to be a fusion expert, but some may claim that they have done a little reading before posting. I'm glad that you are a damn good system designer, but you said that there is a catalysed reaction in the Sun. I don't see this falling into the 'off the cuff' category of comments, but maybe this is system designer terminology.


> 6) I did not propose two electrodes and DC only. I think I also mentioned an ion gun as a starting place
You asked "could a fusor..&c." and a fusor is a two electrode DC device. You can add an ion gun if you like, and my answer is still 'no', and it is for reasons well-described and collated in a recent FAQ that Richard Hull went to the trouble of preparing for you to read.


> 7) If the commentor does not open his mind to possibilities I agree he never will achieve fusion. That doesn't mean others might not. I think the commentor is trying to prove a negative by induction. Doesn't work. Edison (yep he was no Tesla) worked through 1000s of light bulb filliaments.
The commentator has one of the openest minds you can imagine. The commentator has not suggested he will or will not achieve fusion so is not a matter you can agree, or otherwise, on. What has been said that the commentator has not opened his mind to?


> 8) The commentor did not actually answer my question. What about muon injection into a fusor?
The commentator said that this is a well-researched area and from such a comment it should be clear to the questioner that he would find a 'target-rich' search outcome on the internet, if the questioner took on board the suggestion of some reading and self-learning. If the questioner feels unable to do such self-learning because systems designers tends not to have much practice in self-learning, then the commentator is happy to help out by mentioning that muon induced fusion is done at high densites (liquid/solid conditions) and close to absolute zero conditions. The commentator would care to point out that if there was any benefit to muon induced fusion in low density media, such as may be found in an evacuated fusor, then the commentator would have expected muon catalysed researchers to have conducted such experiments but haven't.

[Linda Haile]

Walter, I think (again, if I remember correctly) that the current muon catalyzed fusion experiments use liquid deuterium/tritium.

Your comments about introducing hydrocarbons into a fusor and bombarding with protons will require a synchotron to accelerate the protons to the required energy levels and then it will be very 'hit or miss'.

firing the protons through a carbon 'window' in the fusor would probably be the most feasible solution, but this will still use more energy than can ever be produced.

You may be interested in this:

http://www.rikenresearch.riken.jp/eng/frontline/5976

[walter_b_marvin]

I also read that cryogenic tempetures were used in muon induced fusion. but so far I have no explaination why this was so. If fact, I beleive that muons were first discovered in cosmic ray transactions, at room tempeture. I agree that some kind of injection would probably be required to produce the muons, and this is a starting point for more careful calculations. My idea was to use the fusor itself to produce the alpha particles and thense pions and thense muons. I also stated that the energies were probably wrong. 1ev is roughly 1200 K. the Gev range of reactions would therefore require a tempeture in the 10 exp 12 range or 10,000 times the 10 exp 8 fusor tempeture ranges. Hence an high energy alpha particle injector would be required, even if the carbon were already in the fusor core. Am I wrong about this?

[Carl Willis]

Muon catalyzed fusion has been advocated on this board again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. And again today.

Searching on the word "muon" will uncover all those old threads, in which a more-than-sufficient case is made that the concept is far outside the purview of amateur fusion. (A search will not bring up a few choice threads about muons that were removed for trollsome content.) As I see it, the muon issue will become relevant and tolerated on this forum whenever (if ever!) someone makes the connection between particles of a hundred MeV rest mass energy and what can be accomplished within the constraints of an amateur-science avocation. The day for this may come, however unlikely. But until it does, please do not rehash the subject here.

-Carl

[walter_b_marvin]

This was more conjecture than anything else Producing muons does appear to be a formidble challange

[Mike Beauford]

Hi Walter,

The key sentence Carl stated was "the connection between particles of a hundred MeV rest mass energy and what can be accomplished within the constraints of an amateur-science avocation."

The issue here Walter is it takes a massive amount of energy to create muon's in the lab, think LHC energies to create them. You will not create muons in a home experiment. If you can somehow harness the muons that naturally occur with cosmic rays hitting the earth go for it, but again, this is a dead end.

Mike Beauford

[walter_b_marvin]

I had a thought about natural collection of cosmic rays but to get a flux of 10x6 per sec requires an area 8 football fields in size even at 100% effeciency

[Dan Tibbets]

Indeed, the energy required to produce Muons is difficult to recover by catalyzed fusion within the brief lifetime of the muon.
Wikipedia describes muon catalyzed fusion in a cryogenic bath of deuterium molecules. Here the moun replaces one of the electrons in a molecule, and because of its large mass it orbits much closer to the nucleus. This shields the nucleus from the approaching nucleus, so that coulomb repulsion is delayed until the nuclei approach closer than this small muon orbital distance. This is apparently close enough that the strong nuclear force has a much greater chance of gaining ascendancy over coulomb repulsion, and fusion occurs with a high probability, even in this very cold fluid. In a hot plasma, the electrons are dissociated from the nucleus, so they do not spend much time near a nucleus, compared to an orbiting electron (or orbiting muon). I presume a muon would act similarly, so much of the shielding may be dampened (What is the ionization potential of a hydrogen-muon atom anyway?).
I presume that the muon catalyzed fusion rate in the dense cold liquid, even at low temperatures, is much greater than in a hot and much less dense plasma, so that you would get less fusion energy out over the lifetime of any one muon- the energy balance would be worse. I've not seen any muon scheme that does not incorporate this cold dense atomic fluid. Another issue is the muon source. Cosmic ray derived muons are completely inadiquate. Muons generated in an atom smasher and shot into the fusor could be more dense, but how dense. How much atom smashed products are delivered by large colliders. A few watts? a few thousands of watts? The inefficiencies of the atom smashers would be a large hurdle to over come. You get a few watts worth of muons in order to drive a few thousands of watts of fusion power (probably an optimistic guess). So at the expense of a few hundred millon dollers for the atom smasher, a few megawatts (at least) of power delivered to the atom smasher, you get a net Q fusion reaction (considering the reactor itself), but total system efficiency would still be far short of breakeven.

Dan Tibbets