Cold fusion: muon-catalysed fusion

Abstract

We put into perspective and further develop o w recent work in muon catalysed fusion, with the objective of identifying the key physical processes in the t(d,n)o fusion cyde relevant to energV related applications. We begin by discussing the fusion cycle and point out the importance of direct nuclear reactions in the catalysed fusion processes. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of the muon loss reaction by attachment to the fusion a-particle. Finally, we examine some special topics that have attracted the attention 01 workers in the muon-catalysed Iusion (MuCF) community, such as energy efficient production of muons and proposals for MuCF reactors, the potential of Z > 1 fusion. and other recently discussed forms o l cold fusion.

Strangeness report

“…As chiral symmetry is restored, the mass of the strange quark is expected to decrease from its constituent value to its current value of about 150 MeV, of the same order of the critical temperature. Therefore we expect abundant production of strange quark-antiquark pairs, mainly by gluon-gluon fusion [6,7]. As the partons are deconfined, we expect this enhancement of strangeness production to be more pronounced for multi-strange particles, which can now be built using uncorrelated strange quarks which were produced in independent microscopic interactions: we therefore expect the enhancement to increase with the particles' strangeness content [8].…”

Hadronic signals of deconfinement at RHIC

“…Two effects caused by the disappearance of the vacuum condensates stand out: The melting of the quark condensate lowers the effective mass of the s-quark from about 500 MeV to less than 150 MeV, making it easy to create s-quark pairs in copious quantities [8,9,10]. The dissolution of the gluon condensate and the concomitant screening of the long-range color force by thermal gluons allows light quarks to propagate outside of hadronic bound states.…”

Strange particle freeze-out

“…We show that it is possible to completely fix the freeze-out temperature of strange particles in terms of the central rapidity kaon to Lambda particle abundance ratio at fixed, high transverse mass using a non-equilibrium hadronization model and the measured quark fugacities.Kinetic strange particle production models [1] imply that abundant strangeness is suggestive of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Even more specific information about the nature of the dense matter formed in relativistic nuclear collisions can be obtained considering strange quark and anti-quark clusters, since they are more sensitive to the environment from which they emerge [2].…”