Physics Stub‑class

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Physics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhysicsWikipedia:WikiProject PhysicsTemplate:WikiProject Physicsphysics articles Stub This article has been rated as Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

oppenheimer-phillips process

User:Enric Naval discovered some problems with this article and tried to clean it up, but it's clear he doesn't understand the nuclear physics, I cleaned it up so that the explanation would not only be clear to a lay reader, I hope, but also accurate. He has undone much of this, re-adding errors, massively. While I'm certainly not an expert, I've been studying nuclear physics since about 1954, when I was ten years old, and I thought for a long time I would be a nuclear physicist; I went to Caltech and sat through the Richard P. Feynman lectures that became the well-known textbook. So I have a general background, and the article, as edited by Enric, was, unfortunately, really poor, with blatant errors. There are so many I hardly know where to begin, but I'll start by asking Enric to slow down. The article as I left it was reasonably accurate; it might have some errors in it, but, to point to the dimensions of the problem, take the first sentence in Enric's version, bolding added:

This effect is thought to be caused by the combination of the acceleration of the deuteron, the Coulomb barrier of the heavy nucleus that the deuteron is approaching at high speed, and the great distance between the two molecules of the deuteron.

The deuteron is not accelerating, it is merely a high-energy deuteron. In the experiment involved, it has been given that energy by a particle accelerator, but it could, for example, merely be hot (very hot!), or it could be the heavy nucleus that has been given high velocity. It is the kinetic energy of the deuteron, relative to the heavy nucleus, that is relevant. Acceleration is mere history and is no longer relevant.

Secondly, "Coulomb barrier" is a term Enric is familiar with from Cold fusion; it refers to what makes fusion not take place, ordinarily, except at high energies. The Coulomb barrier is not a physical thing, it is not a general term used for electrostatic repulsion, the repulsion between two particles or objects with the same charge. Another name for the field behind this force is "Coulomb field." The term "Coulomb barrier" is not in the source Enric is following.

So the "Coulomb barrier" is not a property of the heavy nucleus, it is, rather, an effect that results jointly from the positive charge of the nucleus and the positive charge of the deuteron, and that positive charge is a property of the proton, and not of the neutron, so the proton is repelled, but the neutron is not. This creates a stress on the deuteron, which stress is resisted by its binding energy.

And then, worst of all, the deuteron is not composed of molecules. It is the nucleus of a deuterium atom, stripped of the electron. Nuclei, except for the basic hydrogen nucleus, which is a bare proton, are composed of quarks, but these quarks are organized or conceptualized into the older known fundamental particles: protons and neutrons. These are subatomic particles, not molecules, which are full atoms that have been chemically bound, through electron sharing.

And that's just the first sentence. Enric, I did know what I was doing when I edited this article, so I'm asking you to revert to my version, and we can then discuss what's not clear to you. Your version is far too mangled to correct one piece at a time. If we can't agree, I'll arrange that we have a diff that shows the difference, so that we can solicit some expert opinion. --Abd (talk) 16:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]