Misbehaving Ru atoms and valence electrons as dark electrons

The understanding of dark matter in TGD sense has been evolving rapidly recently. Dark matter at magnetic flux tubes appears to be part of ordinary chemistry and even more a part of organic chemistry. Non-equilibrium-thermodynamics has popped up also as a natural application of tensor networks formed from flux tubes carrying dark matter perform quantum phase transitions. The ideas about how to generate systems with life-like properties are getting rather precise. Dark matter and flux tubes are suddenly everywhere! Also this piece of text relates to this revolution.

In FB I received a link to a highly interesting article. The title of the article was "Breakthrough could launch organic electronics beyond cell phone screens" and is tailored to catch the attention of techno-oriented leader. My attention was however caught for different reasons. The proposed technology would rely on the observation that Ruthenium atoms do not behave as they are expected to behave.

Ru atoms appear as dimers of two Ru atoms in the system considered. Free Ru atoms with one valence electron are however needed: they would become ions by giving up their valence electrons, and these electrons would serve as current carriers making the organic material in question semi-conductor. Irradiation by UV light was found to split Ruthenium dimers to single Ru atoms. If the total energy of Ru dimer is smaller than that for two Ru atoms, thermodynamics predicts that the Ru atoms recombine to dimers after the irradiation ceases. The did not however happen!

Can one understand the mystery in TGD framework?

1. Ruthenium atoms have one outer s-electron at 5:th shell. One would expect that Ru dimer has valence bond with shared 5s electrons. I recently learned about mysteriously disappearing valence electrons of rare Earth metals caused by heating. This gives strong support for the idea that valence electrons of free atoms can become dark in TGD sense: that is their Planck constant increases and the orbitals become large. The analogy with Rydberg atoms is obvious and it could be that Rydberg atoms in some case have dark valence electrons. Since electron's binding energy scale scales like 1/h_eff², the creation of these states requires energy and therefore heating is required. Also irradiation by photons with energy equal to energy difference between ordinary and dark states should give rise to the same phenomenon. This would provide a manner to create dark electrons and a new technology.
   
   
2. This also inspired the proposal that valence bond (thought to be understood in chemistry with inspiration coming from the reductionistic dogma) involves flux tube pair and h_eff/h= n which is larger than for ordinary quantum theory. This provides new very concrete support for the view that the transitions from atomic physics to chemistry and from chemistry to organic chemistry could involve new physics provided by TGD.
   

   The step from atomic physics to chemistry with valence bond would involve new physics: the delocalization of valence electrons to flux tubes due to the increase of h_eff! Valence electrons would be dark matter in TGD sense! The step from chemistry to organic chemistry would involve delocalization of proton as dark proton by similar mechanism and give rise to hydrogen bond and also many other new phenomena.
   
   

3. The increase of h_eff would reduce the binding energy from the expected. This would be the case for so called ( and somewhat mysterious) high energy phosphate bond. This picture conforms with the fact that biological energy storage indeed relies on valence bonds.
   

   If this vision is correct, the breaking of valence bond would split the flux tube pair between two Ru atoms by reconnection to flux loops associated with Ru atom. The resulting pair of free Ru atoms would have lower energy than Ru dimer and would be favored by thermodynamics. The paradox would disappear.
   
   

A couple of critical questions are in order.

1. Why irradiation would be needed at all? Irradiation would kick the dimer system over a potential wall separating it from a state two free Ru atoms. Also the magnetic energy of the flux tube would contribute to the energy of dimer and make it higher than that of free state.
   
   
2. Why Ru dimers would not decay spontanously to pairs of free Ru atoms? This is the case if the energy needed to overcome the potential wall is higher than thermal energy at temperatures considered. One could also argue that electronic states with different values of h_eff/h=n are not in thermal equilibrium: one has far-from-equilibrium thermodynamical state. These electrons would indeed represent dark matter in TGD sense and interact rather weakly with ordinary matter so that it would take time for thermal equilibrium to establish itself.
   

   TGD indeed leads to the proposal that the formation of states regarded as far-from-thermal equilibrium states in standard physics approach means formation of flux tubes networks with h_eff/h=n larger than for the original state (see this and this). If this interpretation is correct, then one can also consider the possibility that the energy of the free state is higher than that of the dimer as assumed by the experimenters.
   
   

See the article Mysteriously disappearing valence electrons of rare Earth metals and hierarchy of Planck constants or the chapter Quantum criticality and dark matter of "Hyper-finite factors, p-adic length scale hypothesis, and dark matter hierarchy".

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.