Reply To: Boron availability

[Impaler]

Some additional attempt to develop this concept on my part, though I am grossly under-equipped to do so thus any help assembling the raw data on densities, energy requirements etc which would be necessary to create even a semblance of a theory.

My research has identified so far 4 known mechanical mechanisms that could effectively reverse the process of Fusion and return ‘spent’ mater back to primordial fuel aka hydrogen. As particle physics is a very mature field I’m going to stick to know physics.

Photo-disintegration: The simplest to understand this is simply the process of an atomic nucleus absorbing a high energy photon and breaking apart, the process is endothermic and seems to be very capable of breaking up larger nuclei but it will take extremely high energy photons to break up the smaller nuclei.

Cosmic-ray Spalation: This is the process of fast moving nuclei or electrons crashing into other nuclei and breaking them up, I know Lerner focuses on this mechanism to explain the creation of Lithium without the need for the BB but I’m speculating that it can be used to break up nuclei all the way down to hydrogen.

Neutron Beta decay: Any neutron freed from a nucleus by the first two mechanisms should rapidly decay to a proton, electron and anti-neutrino. This is a fast decay taking only 15 minutes for it’s half-life so in a low density plasma it would be nearly impossible for a free neutron to rejoin a nucleus before decaying in this way.

Inverse Beta Decay: This is the absorption of a Neutrino by a Neutron to create a Proton and electron. While this process would seemingly be the ideal way to get rid of the neutrinos produced in fusion the legendarily low probability of neutrino collisions with atoms in even dense matter makes this unlikely. More likely in my mind is that most Neutrinos are annihilated by anti-neutrinos from the previously mentioned Beta decay process. The resulting gamma ray energy is then available for Photo-disintegration or other endothermic processes.

I’m going to try to get some rough back of the envelope calculations on how active these processes would need to be to balance the fairly well know rates of stellar fusion. Presumably the more matter is in the ‘decay’ portion of the loop the more slowly in can decay while still balancing fusion, conversely the hotter and more energetic the decay the faster it would proceed and the less matter would be needed outside of stars. I’m hoping that some kind of reasonable model can be constructed that has a reasonable matter density, reasonable temperature and produces an element mix matching observations.