About the phase transition transforming ordinary deuterium to exotic deuterium in cold fusion

In the previous posting I already told about a model of cold fusion based on the nuclear string model predicting ordinary nuclei to have exotic charge states. In particular, deuterium nucleus possesses a neutral exotic state which would make possible to overcome Coulomb wall and make cold fusion possible.

1. The phase transition

The exotic deuterium at the surface of Pd target seems to form patches (for a detailed summary see TGD and Nuclear Physics). This suggests that a condensed matter phase transition involving also nuclei is involved. A possible mechanism giving rise to this kind of phase would be a local phase transition in the Pd target involving both D and Pd. In the above reference it was suggested that deuterium nuclei transform in this phase transition to "ordinary" di-neutrons connected by a charged color bond to Pd nuclei. In the recent case di-neutron could be replaced by neutral D.

The phase transition transforming neutral color bond to a negatively charged one would certainly involve the emission of W⁺ boson, which must be exotic in the sense that its Compton length is of order atomic size so that it could be treated as a massless particle and the rate for the process would be of the same order of magnitude as for electro-magnetic processes. One can imagine two options.

1. Exotic W⁺ boson emission generates a positively charged color bond between Pd nucleus and exotic deuteron as in the previous model.

2. The exchange of exotic W⁺ bosons between ordinary D nuclei and Pd induces the transformation Z→Z+1 inducing an alchemic phase transition Pd→Ag. The most abundant Pd isotopes with A=105 and 106 would transform to a state of same mass but chemically equivalent with the two lightest long-lived Ag isotopes. ¹⁰⁶Ag is unstable against β⁺ decay to Pd and ¹⁰⁵Ag transforms to Pd via electron capture. For ¹⁰⁶Ag (¹⁰⁵Ag) the rest energy is 4 MeV (2.2 MeV) higher than for ¹⁰⁶Pd (¹⁰⁵Pd), which suggests that the resulting silver cannot be genuine.

   This phase transition need not be favored energetically since the energy loaded into electrolyte could induce it. The energies should (and could in the recent scenario) correspond to energies typical for condensed matter physics. The densities of Ag and Pd are 10.49 g·cm^-3 and 12.023 gcm^-3 so that the phase transition would expand the volume by a factor 1.0465. The porous character of Pd would allow this. The needed critical packing fraction for Pd would guarantee one D nucleus per one Pd nucleus with a sufficient accuracy.

2. Exotic weak bosons seem to be necessary

The proposed phase transition cannot proceed via the exchange of the ordinary W bosons. Rather, W bosons having Compton length of order atomic size are needed. These W bosons could correspond to a scaled up variant of ordinary W bosons having smaller mass, perhaps even of the order of electron mass. They could be also dark in the sense that Planck constant for them would have the value h= nh₀ implying scaling up of their Compton size by n. For n≈ 2⁴⁸ the Compton length of ordinary W boson would be of the order of atomic size so that for interactions below this length scale weak bosons would be effectively massless. p-Adically scaled up copy of weak physics with a large value of Planck constant could be in question. For instance, W bosons could correspond to the nuclear p-adic length scale L(k=113) and n=2¹¹.

For more details see the chapter TGD and Nuclear Physics and the new chapter Nuclear String Hypothesis of "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis and Dark Matter Hierarchy".