Timeline for Does tritium hydride exhibit measurable spontaneous fusion via proton tunneling?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
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| Sep 14, 2015 at 0:10 | comment | added | Eric Walker | @BenCrowell, is this answer relevant to my recent question, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/205978/…? | |
| Aug 13, 2013 at 20:10 | vote | accept | Terry Bollinger | ||
| Aug 13, 2013 at 20:09 | comment | added | Terry Bollinger | Also, just to mention it: Proton tunnling keeps you alive. If you don't believe it, try giving some tiny critter heavy water for a few days and see what happens. Deuterons are just below the threshold of easy tunneling over molecular distances, which changes their chemistry (versus protons) rather dramatically. Consequently, deuterium is toxic to living organisms as a direct result of quantum effects. Viva la proton tunneling! | |
| Aug 13, 2013 at 20:05 | comment | added | Terry Bollinger | It's fascinating that even though acid chemistry requires protons to tunnel easily over several ångströms, a proton cannot tunnel over the much shorter distance to the triton in a TH molecule. That's of course because the tunneling probability is not just a function of XYZ distance, but also of energy barriers. The proton-proton repulsion barrier for TH tunneling is astronomical, while in chemistry it is XYZ distance that dominates the probability. If the proton-proton repulsion could be "translated" into an XYZ-like distance, I suspect the triton would appear to be meters away. | |
| Aug 12, 2013 at 15:31 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fix factor of pi/2
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| Aug 12, 2013 at 14:23 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 12, 2013 at 4:20 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 12, 2013 at 4:08 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 12, 2013 at 2:12 | comment | added | Terry Bollinger | Steve, thanks, that's a really nice example "fair use" of ballpark approximations! Here's an example of a 1958 B.E. Conway paper that analyzes phenomena in which protons seem to tunnel over atomic distances: nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/v59-025. Am I correct that the key difference between these phenomena is that long-distance proton tunneling phenomena are enabled by the very low chemical energy barriers that must be crossed, versus the astronomically larger ones that must be crossed (albeit over shorter distances) for nuclear fusion within a single bound pair of nucleons? | |
| Aug 11, 2013 at 21:23 | comment | added | user4552 | @SteveB: Thanks for pointing out my mistake. When I wrote 1 nm it was a mistake; I had actually calculated the estimate using 0.1 nm. The estimate of $\exp(-10^4)$ was the correct estimate using 0.1 nm. | |
| Aug 11, 2013 at 21:22 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fix mistake
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| Aug 11, 2013 at 21:01 | comment | added | Steve Byrnes | 1nm is a 10X overestimate of how far apart the nuclei are. 1 angstrom is closer. Googling suggests 0.74 angstroms (0.074nm) as the H-H separation in H$_2$. | |
| Aug 11, 2013 at 20:42 | history | edited | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 11, 2013 at 20:34 | history | answered | user4552 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |