Paper linking rad decay rate to sun-earth distance?!

[Richard Hull]

Just a pointer for those interested to the files section where I have placed a PDF of a scientific paper. Wow!... if real. picked up by a physicist friend of mine at Naval Research Lab.

Any discussion on this might best take place here in this forum.

Richard Hull

[tligon]

Fascinating! Neutrino flux was the first thing that popped in to my mind, but a variation in the fine structure "constant" struck a bell. Wasn't there a paper about a decade ago in which astronomical data were used to show this constant has shifted with time?

This sort of discovery, if proven out, might seem trivial, but could be quite disruptive.

I might be more inclined to count isotope abundance with a mass spec than trust counters for a test like this. I believe that's the preferred method for radiocarbon dating.

[Mike Beauford]

I saw this blurb on slash dot also, and how strong the correlation was in the data sets. I wonder how much of a ripple effect this is going to have in other areas of research?

[Wilfried Heil]

The PTB is Germany's National Bureau of Standards and is highly qualified methodically. Purdue University should be well known to some here by its - publicity - in cold fusion and bubble fusion attempts.

They detected a summer/winter variation in some radioactive decay rates of +/- 0.15%, which was measured quite reproducibly. What springs to my mind here, apart from possible asymmetric neutrino fields orbiting the sun, is the repeatable yearly temperature change between summer and winter. Let's stay on the carpet.

Since the PTB is located not far away, I will try to find out more about what they did experimentally.

[Frank Sanns]

Actually, the most interesting data is the 5 pt PBT data in that report.

The graph shows that the sun is indeed the source of the effect but the distance is not the most important factor. Something in the sun is causing a variation. What is interesting is that the data shows that the effect is twice as prevelent during solar minima and has least effect during solar maxima. Now that is significant. Something extra is happening when the poles are shifting.

I will go on to predict that last year or this year will see another peak that is double the effect since we are presently at or just past the next solar minimum.

Frank Sanns

[Chris Bradley]

Indeed fascinating. Just shooting from the hip here, could this be explained by solar x-ray/gamma spectrum (100keV-1MeV range) that makes it down to earth's surface and that then interacts to promote nuclear decay? I would presume that there may then be some degree of polarisation plausibly in that presumption, which would vary by latitude.

[Carl Willis]

Hi Richard,

Very interesting find. It will also be interesting to watch the developments since you found this while it was only three days old.

I don't know what to say...the correlation is certainly there, and well out of the noise, and the implications are major. Right now the paper is only on Arxiv, meaning it hasn't seen peer review yet. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about these particular measurements will, in the review process, notice some systematic influence that explains these results without implicating an actual change in decay rate. If the effect is real and I had to guess, I would suggest the influence of cosmic rays. If the effect is a systematic error, again I would lay the blame with cosmic rays. Jon R. and I know from low-level neutron counting that muon-induced spallation of lead is a sizeable contribution to the background in lead-shielded neutron detectors. Depending on the materials and configuration then, the experiment could be unwittingly influenced by the increased secondary cosmic ray fluence at perihelion.

Cool.

-Carl

[Chris Bradley]

Carl, are you also considering 'secondary' cosmic rays in your thinking then, such that, eg, seasonal ionospheric activity may influence cosmic ray penetration to the earth's surface? There would tend to be a difference between northern and southern hemispheres, in that case.

[Carl Willis]

Hi Chris,

If the effect is due to cosmic rays then there would certainly be variations linked to all the factors that influence the surface cosmic ray flux.

As an example of the influence of cosmic rays on such an experiment, consider a radioactive source that is carried around in a lead collimator or shield cup. This is then placed periodically next to a Geiger tube or some other detector to take readings. The reading then consists of source counts plus terrestrial background counts plus cosmic background counts. "Background" is collected by doing a count after the source and its shield cup are removed, giving terrestrial background counts at essentially the same level as with the source present, but with fewer cosmic background counts since the spallation source caused by the lead is absent. The effect, once background is subtracted from the source+background count, is that some cosmic counts get associated with the source-only count. I have trouble thinking that a systematic influence this large could have been overlooked, and even if it were I seriously doubt it would be as pronounced as the variation in the present paper. It's a thought.

-Carl

[Larry Upjohn]

Hi all;
this old pharmacist sees some questions with the following link from previous threads:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=324#p2402
and this thread. Has anyone attempted to correlate this new data and the rather sporadic claims of success with CANR-LENR. Just a question for the 3 day weekend as I read the nice paper provided by Richard for our perusal. Enjoy the start of fall everyone! Larry Upjohn.

[Frank Sanns]

Prediction added to my above post.

Frank Sanns

[Wilfried Heil]

There was one precision experiment to determine the gravity constant, which showed an inexplicable increase on a particular day of the week. I think it was Thursday, which turned out to be the day when the housekeeper would water the lawn.

A periodic change in solar background particles would be a possible explanation for the apparent change in decay rates, i.e. higher background counts. A temperature drift of the detector sensitivity would be another.

H. Schrader from the PTB has collected these results over 15 years and the correlation is obviously there. The cosmic ray background is also closely monitored worldwide and does not follow the same yearly rhythm as the decay rates.

[Carl Willis]

Hi Wilfried,

Seems like you have looked into the "cosmic ray theory" and found that it is lacking:

>The cosmic ray background is also closely monitored worldwide and does not follow the same yearly rhythm as the decay rates.

While the "climatological theory" is another viable option, wouldn't you imagine that these issues would be taken care of? Temperature drift in electronics is one option, humidity and air density would be others (if the beta radiation is counted in air), but these would be pretty obvious and surmountable control issues in the design of the experiment. Where is Dr. Schrader's method printed?

-Carl

[Steven Sesselmann]

My first thought when I read this post was the same as Wilfrieds, that if this experiment was conducted in Germany, the lab probably has a central heating system, that switches off at night, or with the seasons.

Allthough one would hope that these variables had been eliminated.

I recall getting a nice day/night sine wave when I was plotting my vacuum leak over a period of a week, simply because the lab cooled down at night.

Steven

[JohnCuthbert]

If you look at fig 3 in the report (the 266 Ra data) there's a nice sinewave which they seek to explain as related to the sun- earth distance and a big spike of roughly twice the amplitude about 1987, that they don't seem to mention (unless I missed it) . There's also a negative spike about 1998.
It would be interesting to try to think up what might have happened that caused the spikes and see if that sheds any light on the origin of the sinusoid variation.

[Frank Sanns]

John,

The years of those spikes line up with solar minima or just after in sunspot activity and at a time that the magnetic fields of the sun are switching polarity. It is an ~11 year cycle so if the data is real then they should be measuring another spike right about now. The solar minum was just reached in January so this year is prime time to see if the effect will repeat.

Also as the sunspot cycle reaches a minum, the magnetic fields and sunspots are more more aligned with the earth as they are closer to the solar equator.

Frank Sanns

[John Futter]

Richard

I get a consistant error when trying to view this file

Is it still working??

[bpaddock]

John Futter wrote:

> I get a consistant error when trying to view this file

You can download the paper from here,
Astrophysics section of Cornell:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1

Pick PDF or PostScript if you have GhostScript/GhostView on the top right.

[bpaddock]

John Futter wrote:

> I get a consistant error when trying to view this file

You can download the paper from here,
Astrophysics section of Cornell:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1

Pick PDF or PostScript if you have GhostScript/GhostView on the top right.

[Richard Hull]

I just returned to my work e-mail. This subject is most interesting and we will have a lot of questions as will many scientists.

I have found that some of the largest CME's occur in the waning part of the solar cycle.
I would love to see how these affect the result. We had a couple of monster CME's a couple of years back and boosted my lab's neutron background count 3-4X!! The ticket would be to see a relatively short lived isotope tested during or near a CME.

Before the crowd looking at remediation claims of nuclear materials chimes in, the bulk of such claims are totally bogus and done by folks who haven't got a clue about what they are doing.

I had to tell one guy who approached me saying he remediated U ore to a rayless state, chemically, by noting that he had washed away the bulk of the beta emitting daughters and that his trusty CV-700 would not see the remaining U alphas.

This was noted early in the 1900's when Sir William Crooks rendered uranium "rayless" by perciptating out the heavy beta emitters, short lived.Th234 and Pa234 from urnaium metal.

Carl's own U extraction results were not very active until the samples I obtained were 4-5 months old when all the above isotopes had "grown" back into the samples.

I also do not attach any link or significance to this paper's results associated to the variable nature of the CANR-LENR results. As the results are most likely do to more gross elements within the experiments themselves.

I found the paper fascinating and pregnant with possiblities. The root cause will either amuse us mightily when found as error on behalf of the researchers or change a lot of notions about stars and matter at some significant level.

Richard Hull

[tligon]

What kinds of experiments could be done to test the suspected effects in the laboratory?

Can we produce (or exploit an existing source) neutrinos at a flux comparable to the solar flux?

Rather than rely on radiation counters, can we do sampling of isotopic abundance over a long period using mass spectrometers, as is done for isotope dating? That should eliminate short-term instrument effects, and you can incorporate calibration standards (stable elements of known isotope abundance) in the samples.

I have no idea how we would manipulate the fine structure constant (it is supposed to be constant, after all), but we can presumably measure it. Can we reliably measure it during the course of a year?

Could an experiment be piggybacked on a deep space probe? What would happen if we had a suitable instrument heading for one of the outer planets and beyond? Or do we have something suitable already out there from which we could extract applicable data?

[Frank Sanns]

There are neutrino experiments her on earth, Fermilab for one that could produce a good flux but there is no guarantee that it is neutrinos that are responsible. It could be systematic error but it could be real. Time and repeat experiments and set-ups will tell.

You have the right idea though not to the outer planet but to the sun with a probe. If it is a phenomenon that follows the inverse square law then the effects would become much more pronounced very quickly as a probe would approach the sun. Solar heatng would go up quickly too and have to be dealt with. An isotope on board with three or four detectors with various shieldings would prove an interesting experiment.

Frank Sanns

[Chris Bradley]

Here is a suggestion that has just occurred to me. It may be nothing, it may be a factor, it may be the answer - just throwing it into the pot:

Total solar flux to earth's surface is lower during winter months (whilst perihelion is around January 4th), which implies that the cosmic ray shadow that the sun casts on the earth is less, hence more sea-level cosmic rays are expected in winter.

Simple scientific resolution to determine - see if the relationship is reversed in the southern hemisphere (i.e. is the same for local winter/summer).

best regards,

Chris MB.

[Wilfried Heil]

Richard has thrown in a tough nut to crack here. I heard about the PTB results some time ago and stuffed them away under unsolved oddities. So thanks for bringing it up again.

The experiment used a number of ionisation chambers to detect the decay of a beta emitter, whose decay constant was to be determined. The chambers were spiked with a small amount of Ra-226, an alpha emitter at 4.87 MeV. This was used as a calibration standard with an essentially constant decay rate. The decay constant of e.g. Eu-152 was then determined against the Radium standard. Only the relation of the two was of interest, not the actual count rates for each isotope. It was apparently assumed that environmental changes would affect both count rates in the same way.

Looking at the raw data then revealed the yearly oscillations of the Ra-226 count rate.

As one can see, the maximum in the count rate lags behind the earth perihel by about 1-2 months, just as the temperature usually does (it is coldest in January and February). The amplitude of the oscillation does not follow 1/r^2 either, but is about 30% smaller, so this relation could be coincidental.

The solar "cosmic ray" activity follows the 11 year solar cycle, but their intensities are quite erratic on a shorter timescale. They don't seem to qualify as the cause of the observed oscillations.

Whatever the reason for this may be, my best guess is that the researchers at PTB have unwittingly built a detector that doubles as a fancy barometer or thermometer, at the 0.1% level of its scale. Other experiments with a comparable setup elsewhere would then give similar results.

Repeating such an experiment on the southern hemisphere would show quickly if the decay rate oscillated with the same phase as in the north or against it.

[DaveC]

I've been digesting the paper's analysis, since Richard posted it. (Thanks, Richard!)

It seems to me, that a simple plot of the decay rate ratios of both the BNL and PTB data against the (1/R)^2 values of earth - sun distance, should yield a line, whose functionality would indicate whether these were strictly proportional or otherwise.

The implications are fascinating. If indeed the decay rate is influenced...(dare we say "caused') by something of stellar(solar) production , moving toward the Sun would accelerate the decay rate... and hasten the path toward end state stability.

Moving to a lower influence, would arrest the decay process...some or more (?).

I've mulling over what evidence there is for the basic conclusion that the decay rate Is or was or should invariant, in the first place.
A review of the basic papers leading to these conclusions is as important as the conclusions themselves.

Decay rate calculations seem very much less definite than say the null results of the Michelson-Morley Ether Drift experiments. Getting decay constants out to 6 or 8 decimal places takes a long time... and long term stability of anything we use as instruments comes into play as a basic spoiler.

Dave Cooper