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The Power Of Quantum Mechanics Allows The Sun To Shine
Posted on Monday, July 06, 2015 @ 15:26:17 UTC by vlad
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From Forbes.com: It's The Power Of Quantum Mechanics That Allows The Sun To Shine, by Ethan Siegel
 The greatest source of concentrated energy in the Universe today is starlight, where the largest single objects in the Universe emit tremendous amounts of power through the smallest of processes: the nuclear fusion of subatomic particles...
How does this happen? Deep inside the hearts of stars — including in our own Sun’s core — light elements are fused together under extreme conditions into heavier ones. At temperatures over about 4 million kelvin and at densities more than ten times that of solid lead, hydrogen nuclei (single protons) can fuse together in a chain reaction to form helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process...
It means that every time the Sun winds up fusing four protons into a helium-4 nucleus, it results in the net release of 28 MeV of energy, which comes about through the mass-energy conversion of Einstein’s E = mc**2.
All told, by looking at the power output of the Sun, we measure that it emits a continuous 4 × 10**26 Watts, which means that inside the Sun’s core, a whopping 4 × 10**38 protons fuse into helium-4 every second.
If you consider that there are some 10**57 particles in the entire Sun, of which a little less than 10% are in the core, this might not sound so far-fetched. After all:
- These particles are moving around with tremendous energies: each proton has a speed of around 500 km/s in the center of the Sun’s core.
- The density is tremendous, and so particle collisions happen extremely frequently: each proton collides with another proton billions of times each second.
- And so it would only take a tiny fraction of these proton-proton interactions resulting in fusion into deuterium — about 1-in-10**28 – to produce the necessary energy of the Sun.
So even though most particles in the Sun don’t have enough
energy to get us there, it would only take a tiny percentage fusing
together to power the Sun as we see it. So we do our calculations, we
calculate how the protons in the Sun’s core have their energy
distributed, and we come up with a number for these proton-proton
collisions with sufficient energy to undergo nuclear fusion.
That number is exactly zero. The electric repulsion between the two positively charged particles is too great for even a single pair of protons to overcome it and fuse together with the energies in the Sun’s core...
The secret is that, at a fundamental level, these atomic nuclei don’t
behave as particles alone, but rather as waves, too. Each proton is a
quantum particle, containing a probability function that describes its
location, enabling the two wavefunctions of interacting particles to
overlap ever so slightly, even when the repulsive electric force would
otherwise keep them entirely apart.
There’s always a chance that these particles can undergo quantum tunneling,
and wind up in a more stable bound state (e.g., deuterium) that causes
the release of this fusion energy, and allows the chain reaction to
proceed. Even though the probability of quantum tunneling is very small
for any particular proton-proton interaction, somewhere on the order of
1-in-10**28, or the same as your odds of winning the Powerball lottery three times in a row, that ultra-rare interaction is enough to explain the entirety of where the Sun’s energy (and almost every star’s energy) comes from... Full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/06/22/its-the-power-of-quantum-mechanics-that-allow-the-sun-to-shine/
Note: A very interesting article! Any physicist out there dares to comment? Does it mean that the secret to fusion on demand (hot or cold) could actually be smart manipulation of the wave properties of interacting particles, to increase the chance (to force) a quantum tunneling effect? [Vlad]
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This is NOT how the sun works (Score: 1)
by Kadamose on Monday, July 06, 2015 @ 15:55:31 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | This article is an obvious load of disinformation. The sun is NOT a nuclear reactor (fission or fusion), and does not operate anything like 'quantum mechanics' predicts it does. The sun, in all actuality, is very similar to a filament - meaning it is receiving electrical energy from 'somewhere' and converting that electricity into heat and light. It's a massive, glorified resistor.
The same people who come up with these lies about how the sun will eventually run out of fuel (it won't because it doesn't even use fuel) are the same people who say that we will run out of 'fossil fuels' very shortly (it won't ever happen because these so-called 'fossil fuels' don't even come from fossils - these hydrocarbons are the 'blood' of the planet and are abiotic.)
We have all been tricked by these so-called scientific experts for long enough. It's time to wake up and learn the truth - and take back our birthright!
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Re: This is NOT how the sun works (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Tuesday, September 08, 2015 @ 11:19:08 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Ding! Co-Co |
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Thermal Resonance Fusion (Score: 1)
by vlad on Friday, July 10, 2015 @ 22:36:08 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | I found this abstract very interesting as well (via Ego Out - link above):
Thermal Resonance Fusion
Bao-Guo Dong
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.01650
(Submitted on 7 Jul 2015)
We first show a possible mechanism to create a new type of nuclear fusion, thermal resonance fusion, i.e. low energy nuclear fusion with thermal resonance of light nuclei or atoms, such as deuterium or tritium. The fusion of two light nuclei has to overcome the Coulomb barrier between these two nuclei to reach up to the interacting region of nuclear force. We found nuclear fusion could be realized with thermal vibrations of crystal lattice atoms coupling with light atoms at low energy by resonance to overcome this Coulomb barrier. Thermal resonances combining with tunnel effects can greatly enhance the probability of the deuterium fusion to the detectable level. Our low energy nuclear fusion mechanism research - thermal resonance fusion mechanism results demonstrate how these light nuclei or atoms, such as deuterium, can be fused in the crystal of metal, such as Ni or alloy, with synthetic thermal vibrations and resonances at different modes and energies experimentally. The probability of tunnel effect at different resonance energy given by the WKB method is shown that indicates the thermal resonance fusion mode, especially combined with the tunnel effect, is possible and feasible. But the penetrating probability decreases very sharply when the input resonance energy decreases less than 3 keV, so for thermal resonance fusion, the key point is to increase the resonance peak or make the resonance sharp enough to the acceptable energy level by the suitable compound catalysts, and it is better to reach up more than 3 keV to make the penetrating probability larger than 10^{-10}.
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How long does it take an electron to tunnel? (Score: 1)
by solaris on Sunday, August 30, 2015 @ 10:31:11 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) |  The combination of ab-initio numerical experiments and theory shows that optical tunnelling of an electron from an atom can occur instantaneously.
How long does it take an atom to absorb a photon and lose an electron? And what if not one but many photons are needed for ionization? How much time would absorption of many photons take? These questions lie at the core of attosecond spectroscopy, which aims to resolve electronic motion at its natural time scale.
Ionization in strong infrared fields is often viewed as electron tunnelling through a potential barrier, created by the combination of the atomic potential that binds the electron and the electric field of the laser pulse that pulls the electron away. Thus, unexpectedly, attosecond spectroscopy finds itself facing an almost age-old and controversial question: how long does it take an electron to tunnel through a barrier?
Article link: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-electron-tunnel.html#nRlv [phys.org]
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Re: The Power Of Quantum Mechanics Allows The Sun To Shine (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Tuesday, September 08, 2015 @ 11:18:14 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | | The temperature of stars is not enough to to sustain fusion. Elements fuse because the electrical forces between nuclei are reduced by the effects of Quantum Electrodynamics. It is a form of nuclear catalysis similar to chemical catalysis. Every force is transmitted by an exchange particle, including electrical forces which are transmitted by photons. Create a situation were the structure of the space doesn't match the wavelengths of the exchange particle and the electrical force between the two particles will vanish. Nuclear forces then over ride electrical forces and fusion ensues. The process is called "Electrodynamic Catalysis. |
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