Talk:Muon-catalyzed fusion

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I'm a bit confused about the "unreferenced" tag that's been slapped on this article. There are a plethora of references, citations, and footnotes. Perhaps someone could help me out here and point to a specific example in the article of anything in need of further referencing. Puzzling--very puzzling, indeed--perhaps the "unreferenced" tag is is the work of some mischievious wikibot gone wild. Randyfurlong 20:59, 8 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article is written at a very technical level and could use some dumbing-down, at least in the summary. --JD79 00:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's not just written at an excessively technical level; it's also extraordinarily verbose, with a large number of barely-relevant sidetracks. The main point is buried deep within the article, after about a page of physics blather. It should not take this much verbiage to say: "Muons are unstable subatomic particles created in particle accelerators. They are similar to electrons, but about 207 times more massive. When a muon is involved in chemical bonding between two atomic nuclei, the nuclei are consequently drawn 207 times closer together than they would be in a normal molecule. When the nuclei are this close together, the probability of nuclear fusion is greatly enhanced, to the point where a significant number of fusion events can happen at room temperature. Unfortunately, it is difficult to create large numbers of muons efficiently; moreover, their short lifetime of 2.2 microseconds means that a muon can only catalyze a few hundred nuclear fusion reactions before it decays away. These two factors limit muon-catalyzed fusion to a laboratory curiosity, although there is some speculation that an efficient muon source could someday lead to a useful room-temperature fusion reactor." Someone needs to go through all this verbiage and pick out the points that are actually relevant to the main point of the article.

The neutrality tag, however, is not appropriate. Muon-catalyzed fusion is not in any way associated with cold fusion "junk science" based on absorption of Hydrogen by Palladium. It is a real phenomenon which has been published and discussed in the physics community. I'm removing the NPOV tag.

Thanks for removing the inappropriate neutrality tag! Since I wrote most of that "physics blather" that you find so pointless and annoying, I'd be more than happy to winnow out any wheat from among the "extraordinarily verbose" chaff. The very fact that you apparently missed the most important point about muons sticking to the alpha "ash" a little too often is all the evidence I need that I'd better try harder to focus in on the essentials! Thanks (I think)! Randyfurlong 01:19, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Copied from the cold fusion article:

Maybe add Jones and Rafelski to muon article

The introduction to the cold fusion article has a link to muon-catalyzed fusion. This article began by saying that Jones and Rafelski "initiated" muon-catalyzed fusion, but as you see from the link, they did not. Sakharov, Frank and Alvarez initiated it. (See the article here and Mallove, p. 108). So I removed Jones and Rafelski from the first paragraph. They did contribute to muon research, however. Perhaps someone should patch up the muon-catalyzed fusion article to include them. I am not familiar with their work, so I cannot do this. --JedRothwell 15:34, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The first sentence

I would just like to point out that the first sentence is wrong. All the papers on muon catalized fusion that I have seen require tepuratures around 1000 K before significant amounts of fusion will occure. I realize that this is well below the tempuratures need for MFE but 1000 K is not room tempurature.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.95.94.110 (talk • contribs) 23:38, 3 December 2006 (UTC).[reply]

I've altered the first sentence slightly in response to your (anonymous) suggestion. However, I know I've seen papers discussing cool fusion at truly cool temperatures, such as at liquid DT temperatures, where the rates of cool fusion are not at all shabby! See, for example, any of the Phys. Rev. Lett. articles by Steve Jones concerning experiments he and his group performed at LAMPF (the Los Alamos Meson Production Facility). Somewhat ironically, cool fusion needs to have temperatures that are below about 1 or 2 eV or so, corresponding to about 10,000K or 20,000K or so, because otherwise the Vesman resonances, which accelerate the formation of the muonic molecular ions, become useless, while hot thermonuclear fusion needs to have temperatures that are above at least 5 keV or more, corresponding to about 50,000,000K or more!Randyfurlong 01:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality;Refs

It seems obvious that there is a divide between proponents of cold fusion and the general scientific community. Also obvious is that the CF article and its subsidiaries were edited largely by a small handful of proponents. So I added the same NPOV tag that exists on the main article.