BRIEF NOTE[/font]
ON PIEZONUCLEAR CAVITATION[/font]
EDITED BY Fabio Cardone, Giovanni Cherubini, Roberto Mignani, Walter Perconti, Eliano Pessa, Andrea Petrucci, Francesca Rosetto, Guido Spera.
WITH THE ASSENT OF Antonio Aracu, Giovanni Albertini, Claudio Bertoli, Alberto Carpinteri, Andrea Dodaro, Giuseppe Lacidogna, Amedeo Manuello, Andrea Manuello, Francesco Mazzuca, Massimiliano Monti, Fabio Pistella, Filippo Ridolfi, Valter Sala, Emilio Santoro, Massimo Sepielli, Sesto Viticoli.
The results on Piezonucler Cavitation have already been published on peer reviewed journals like Physics Letters A, International Journal of Modern Physics B and E, Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Annals of the Foundation of Louis de Broglie (at the end of this Note you can find a list of these papers including the book on the theory foseeing these new phenomena).
This fact indicates that our work is not made of mere conjectures or inventions. However, the subject of our investigation is indeed new and like anything new (in physics above all) encounters more frowns than
approvals. Nonetheless, some referees deemed convincing our reports and evidences in the papers.
We would like to stress that every characteristic of the experimental set-up, from which we obtained emission of neutron bursts, is crucial for achieving compatible results. It is impossible and even wrong to imagine that any equipment for producing cavitation may generate this new type of nuclear reactions and produce neutron bursts as some research team hypothesised. The statement about the criticality of the design of the experimental set-up should not sound strange, since having to do with something completely new to our physical knowledge, it is up to us to understand how we can produce the effect first and then detect it and not suppose that, by the cavitation equipment at one's disposal, the effect will show up anyway.
We have been dealing with three main subjects: cavitation of bi-distilled deionised water in which we found out anomalous changes of concentration of elements; cavitation of solutions of Iron from which we obtained bursts of neutrons without gamma emission above the background level; cavitation of solutions of a radionuclide, from which we apparently obtained a decrease of radioactivity more quickly than it would happen through natural decay. As to the first and second subjects, we performed many experiments with 100% of compatibility and the only remark from the referees was about neutron emission. Every time they frowned on the passive bubble detectors that we used to detect neutrons.
They suggested using Boron Trifluoride active detectors instead.
We followed their suggestion and performed many experiments by this type of detector and achieved evidences of neutron bursts absolutely compatible with those obtained by bubble detectors. All of this can be found by comparing the papers "Neutrons from piezonuclear Reactions" and "Piezonuclear Neutrons", where you will find also that a third type of passive detector (polycarbonate CR39 screened by Boron) was used as well and that the evidences obtained by CR39 were compatible with those of bubble detectors and Boron Trifuoride. No other objections or remarks on cavitation of iron solutions and neutron emission have been put forward since then.
Let us move now to the results obtained with solutions containing a radionuclide (Thorium-228).
We performed this type of experiments only once due to the technical difficulties of dealing with radioactivity and the obvious concerns about health, anyway we used not less than 12 samples in order to get enough confidence with the results.
One experiment with either positive or negative evidences is absolutely far from being conclusive due to the lack of sufficient statistics of results. The only purpose of this paper was to let people know that apparently cavitation affects radioactive nuclei too and that this open new perspectives of research. Thus, the comments by anybody do not add anything new to what everyone of us would say about these early stage results.
As long as the remarks are made without performing new experiments, they will hardly say anything new or point out any shortcoming of our paper that we are not aware of.
However a Canadian research team published on Physics Letters A a paper entitled "Measurement of the thorium-228 activity in solutions cavitated by ultrasonic sound" in which they report experimental evidences that they claim to be against our evidences about thorium.
We give you here the reference for your convenience (Physics Letters A 374 (2010) 701-703, R. Ford, M.Gerbier-Violleau, E.Vázquez-Jáuregui).
Their experiment is the perfect example of how these kind of experiments MUST NOT be done in the sense that we mentioned above i.e. the criticality of the equipment. If you read our papers and theirs, you will soon become aware of the huge differences and that their equipment does not apply cavitation to the
solution containing thorium-228 because they enclosed this solution in small cylinders that prevent ultrasound from suitably affecting thorium.
Here is the link to Arxiv (
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.5391) where you can find our remarks on this Canadian experiment and suggestions about how to perform experiments of piezonuclear reactions.
