The following question/post has been submitted by ECW reader Jean-Pierre.
I am always appreciative of very learned people who have the patience to correct and/or further enlighten a struggling novice in a particular field of study. Please feel free to assist me in my attempts to get to grips with Bose-Einstein Condensates, and the part that they seem to play in LENR. The following is my somewhat hazy understanding garnered from all the comments so far made.
No one really knows what an electron really is ,but it is known that it bears three characteristics or properties, viz mass, charge and spin. No one knows what the second one is but the electron is said to carry the negative sort. The term spin is a property that can be thought of in a very simple way as a sort of compass needle that has two directions associated with it. Thus spin is magnetic in nature?
When an electron encounters a quantum of light from a laser at a the right frequency and suitable conditions , the two become momentarily entangled in such a way that this results in the electron becoming split into two quasi entities ( ‘particles’). One carries away the spin characteristic and is called a spinon (aka polariton) while the other waltzes off with the mass and negative charge and is called the orbiton.
As more and more polaritons are formed in a particular small region of space in say a plasma, there seems to be some sort of wish to have a party /get together because of some sort of attraction. This results in a clumping action. I note that bosons appear to exhibit social behaviour so perhaps we see bosonic behaviour here? The result is a ‘condensing’ action and the clump is called a Bose-Einstein condensate or BEC. If this clumping reaches a certain critical number, and these spinons magically line up in the same direction ,a relatively large amount of energy is given off (in the form of photons?). It is a bit like the critical mass being reached in the atom bomb. What happens to the BEC immediately after this energy is emitted? I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Higgs will start meddling in some peculiar way.
In the meantime the orbitons carry negative charge and mass and this charge causes antisocial behaviour (Fermionic so to speak) and these quasi entities repel each other and fly apart. Since we know that a flow of electrons produces a magnetic field around its path, do the orbitons also exhibit this behaviour? What happens to these orbitons? Do they fly about the plasma and increase in number as more BECS are formed? Are they easily affected by deliberately applied magnetic fields so that they can all be made to move in a chosen direction to be useful?
Finally, we have become aware of manifestations called double layers. Is there a simple picture that we can visualise involving their construction? Do BECs and floating orbitons play a major part in these double layers? So sorry if my delving into the subject, by trying to read and understand the comments in the ECW blog, has produced a very confused personal picture. I would welcome any efforts to clarify things.
Thanks. Jean Pierre