Einstein Foresaw Weak Interactions and Collective Effects in LENRs

Dec. 23, 2012 – By Steven B. Krivit –

In 1951, Albert Einstein reviewed results of experimental work performed at Cornell University and speculated that weak interactions and collective effects were most likely responsible for the observed anomalous production of neutrons.

The experiments were performed by Ernest J. Sternglass, who began graduate studies in engineering physics at Cornell in 1949. In his 1997 book Before the Big Bang, Sternglass tells the story of his discovery. At that time, Cornell’s staff included some of physics’ greatest minds of the 20th century, including Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe.

In his experiments, Sternglass found that “neutrons could apparently be formed from protons and electrons at very low energies, far below the energy predicted by the existing theory.”

This is precisely what happens in LENRs, as explained by the Widom-Larsen theory. To be fair, many LENR researchers had speculated that an inverse beta-decay reaction could, in principle, produce neutrons in LENR experiments. But nobody had figured out the detailed physics of exactly how such a process might be able to work in condensed-matter systems in a tabletop experiment, until 2005, when Lewis Larsen and Allan Widom released a pre-print explaining their theory.

Sternglass got the idea for his novel experiments from reading about the search for the neutron by Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick and from theoretical calculations by Charles Galton Darwin that had been published in the early 1920s. In his book, Sternglass describes his apparatus, which consisted of an antique hydrogen-filled X-ray tube.

“The tube was similar to an old gas-discharge type of X-ray tube system,” Sternglass writes, “Such a gas-discharge tube operates like a modern fluorescent lamp, being nothing much more than a tube filled with a gas at a low pressure to which voltage is applied at the ends where metal wires fuse into the glass, conducting electrical discharges that allow current to pass through the gas. But instead of applying 100 or 200 volts or so, as do present-day fluorescent lamps, in the early years of X-ray studies such tubes were operated at many thousands of volts.”

But, as Sternglass explains in his book, he didn’t expect the experiment to work.

“According to the existing theory of the neutron and its decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino as worked out by Fermi, there was no chance that such an experiment could hope to succeed. The neutron was believed to have a mass so large that it would take an electron accelerated to about 780,000 volts to produce it. But the power supply of [the] X-ray tube would only provide about 35,000 volts, some 22 times less,” Sternglass writes.

Sternglass knew that, according to Darwin’s calculations, “neutrons might be formed by capturing an electron even at low energies.” When his experiments showed signs of induced radioactivity 30 percent to 50 percent above background, many of his colleagues didn’t believe it.

So Sternglass wrote a letter to Einstein at the end of August 1951, because nobody in his Physics Department, including Bethe, was able – or willing – to suggest a possible physics mechanism to explain his results.

Einstein looked at Sternglass’ data and immediately said that the neutron production must involve many-body collective effects with electrons.

“Einstein suggested that perhaps more than the energy produced by the applied potential might become available if more than one electron were to give up its energy to a proton at the same time, something that is conceivable according to quantum theory,” Sternglass writes.

However, Sternglass was very impatient to get a Ph.D. and did not have a plausible explanation for his experimental data at that time. Thus, despite strong encouragement from Einstein to “be stubborn” and pursue the work further to solve the mystery of anomalous neutron production, Sternglass dropped the X-ray tube work. He didn’t try to publish a report, and he quickly completed his Ph.D. dissertation on a different topic. The only place where his perplexing discovery was ever described is in Chapter 6 of his book, which he published for a general audience in 1997.

The physics explanation that eluded Sternglass in 1951 is precisely what Larsen and Widom finally published in great detail 54 years later in a preprint uploaded to the Cornell physics arXiv in May 2005.

According to Sternglass, his experiment was independently repeated with exactly the same experimental apparatus two years later by Edward Trounson, a physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

But then, nine years later, Sternglass had a chance to do another variation of the experiment based on a method that Einstein had suggested that used an electron beam of known energy impacting a target material in a vacuum. But in those later, significantly different types of experiments, he didn’t detect any neutrons.

Larsen explained to New Energy Times that Sternglass’ later experiments failed to produce readily detectable fluxes of neutrons because a pure, very dilute electron beam hitting a hydrogen-containing target in a vacuum does not necessarily maximize local collective effects on the surfaces of target materials. This type of experiment may or may not create the required conditions for triggering electroweak neutron production through the e + p reaction.

By contrast, the configuration Sternglass used in his original experiments with an old hydrogen-filled X-ray tube did a much better job creating those conditions. In those experiments, Sternglass effectively had a high-voltage electrical discharge between eroding metallic electrodes bathed in low-pressure, ionized hydrogen gas. This guaranteed a very large supply of protons for e + p reactions in micron-scale regions of nuclear-strength local electric fields that can form on metallic hydride surfaces.

Although Einstein was on the right track when he suggested the concept of collective effects, he did not understand the subtleties of exactly which types of experimental systems would strongly favor such collective behavior.

Larsen found the Sternglass book by chance in 2006, a year after he and Widom had uploaded the arXiv pre-print of their first theory paper. Larsen was so intrigued with the story about the long-lost experiments that he contacted Sternglass and had several phone conversations with him to obtain more details about the amazing discovery at Cornell so many years ago.

Larsen wrote about this in 2011.