Reply To: Set up a holding company
The Focus Fusion Society › Forums › Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Experiment (LPPX) › Breakthrough Billion Degree Confinement – LPP Press Release Jan 4 2011 › Reply To: Set up a holding company
Ivy MattIvy Matt wrote: So, presumably the information on the p-B11 fusion reaction was obtained by bombarding a boron-11 target with accelerated protons, and this was done back in the early ’70s.
Half right, half wrong. I was off by forty years.
Documentation of p-B11 fusion. See especially page 240.
Documentation of 8.7 MeV. See especially page 290.
Lerner wrote: It actually is easy and fun to look up the answers to these questions on the web—reaction rates and all are easy to find. I hope people on this forum will do that.
Well, I’ll vouch for the fun part, at least. Historical research is right up my alley. I spent much of Friday night and Saturday morning searching and reading about George H. Miley and UIUC; Francis K. McGowan and the Nuclear Data Tables; Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ experiments during the 1950s; and finally Cockcroft and Walton, Rutherford and Oliphant, Kirchner, Dees and Gilbert, and others “splitting the atom” in the 1930s. I hadn’t realized that phrase originally referred to nuclei with atomic weights less than iron.
Heres more historical background for those interested:
CERN Courier article on Cockcroft.