Seeking referee-like comments on neutron detection technique in linked paper

pdxjjb

Hope mods will allow this. Seeking comments on neutron detection techniques described in the linked paper. Authors are affiliated with China Institute of Atomic Energy, Beijing. This is a LENR paper with no theoretical content. Full text is free to download.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0256-307X/29/11/112501

Jeff

mfb

I am not an expert, but here are some things which confused me in the paper:

Infrequent? Are there nuclear reactions which produce neutrons sometimes, and sometimes not?

Not really convincing. If you try, you can find positive results for every crap. The question is how many (sensitive) negative results there are.

Are there any scientific measurements which do not require that?

Trivial, if done automatic or with statistical methods. If not, it is problematic and you should explain this.

Helpful? I think the observation of nuclear products is required to observe nuclear reactions.

I think you should introduce the detector design first before talking about performance details.

Where are the neutron detectors, and how do they work? You did not explain this. Just filling 3He in a tube is not enough.

Pure U-238?

You could add some sketch of the Ti/D-foils.

Cycles of what?

Figure 2 should get error bars.

I think that should be 0.088 counts/s.

If you calculate the difference between two values with 0.03 uncertainty, the resulting uncertainty is not 0.03 unless you have some correlation (which I would not expect here, if you have that you should explain it).

The position of that text at the bottom of the page is a bit unfortunate - probably TeX-induced, and might change with text edits.

Obvious for cosmics-induced background.

1-05?

Why? I don't see a reason why cosmic rays could not give several bursts within two hours. It is rare, so what?

Do your measurement cycles influence the measurements in some way? In figure 5, you recorded 8 bursts within 7 minutes, but those bursts had a length of ~64µs, right?

Both in figure 6a and 6b I can see bursts which are very close together. They seem to consist of 2 or maybe just 3 bursts each, but they are so close that they look correlated in some way.

The burst sequences in the deuterium samples are so rare that they might occur in the control samples as well, and you were just unlucky to miss them (because none happened during your measurement).

Where did you do that?

Based on what?

Random in which way?

In general: If you expect something based on deuterium, what happens if you use regular hydrogen instead?

I am not convinced that something happened based on deuterium. A control sample with protium would help, and longer measurement periods to see more burst sequences (or no burst sequences for a longer measurement period in the control measurements).

pdxjjb

Thanks for your comments.