C60 + DT Fusion: Can Buckyballs Squeeze Hydrogen to Metallic State?

[sanman]

What do you all think about this?

http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Storage-Method-Turns-Hydrogen-Metallic-81313.shtml

http://nanotechnologytoday.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiny-buckyballs-squeeze-hydrogen-like.html

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4256976.html

Metallic hydrogen is even more dense than frozen hydrogen. So far, nobody has ever been able to squeeze hydrogen densely enough to achieve a metallic state. But the graphene/nanotubes/buckyballs are newer and game-changing.

What if you could pack lots deuterium and tritium inside these buckyballs, squeezing these heavy isotopes into ultra-dense metal form? And furthermore, what if you attempted experiments like Taleyarkhan et al did, using ultrasound waves to further collide and compress them? The buckyballs are supposed to be quite physically robust, and able to withstand impacts at huge velocities:

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/fullerenes.html

About a billionth of a meter in diameter, they are incredibly stable-- slammed against a steel surface at 17,000 miles per hour, they bounce off undisturbed.

They might be able to survive ultrasonic compression.

Also, buckyballs have photonic resonance capable of making them expand and contract rhythmically:

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2005/May/06-buckyballs.html

The continuous beam of [buckyball] ions interacts with the photon beam as it is tuned through a range of values, from less than 20 eV to more than 70 eV.
...
The second resonance in C-60, occurring at a photon energy of 38 eV, is called a volume plasmon — not a back-and-forth oscillation of the valence electron cloud but rather an in-and-out contortion, like squeezing a beach ball.

What if you were to resort to this form of compression too?

I'm thinking that all of these things together could result in a nuclear fusion process.


Comments? Let me know what you think.

 

[vanesch]

Difficult to say, but in order for fusion to happen, one needs to give of the order of several tens of KeV to each particle. We seem to be talking about a few tens of eV. You may be impressed by 17 000 miles an hour, but in fact that's kinetic energy which is of the order of just a few eV per particle (a neutron at ~4000 miles an hour has *thermal* energies of the order of 0.03 eV).

Of course, I can't really say anything about metallic hydrogen, bucky balls and all that, but when I look at the per particle energy scale, I would think we're still far away from any fusion energy scale.

 

[sanman]

Well, so then your sonofusion-style oscillations are capped by the structural strength of the buckyballs.

But perhaps you could synchronize the sonofusion-style oscillation/compression cycles with the photon-induced volume plasmon resonance cycles, to time them to coincide with each other.

And maybe in addition to that, you could also fire pulses of an intense muon-beam into the system in synchronized fashion, to let muons catalyze D-T fusions at the peak of the oscillations, right when the atoms are compressed to maximum density.

There's no reason why these various approaches have to be mutually exclusive, when they could be combined together, particularly making use of time synching. Sometimes the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" (ie. the use of these things in concert could have a better chance of surpassing breakeven than each alone could)