[NewCandle] Sideways Alchemy - tungsten-gold?

[Nick Reiter]

Hello, all,

Even though I've been putting a number of brain cells out to pasture over the Bi2Te3 topological insulator matter, I've continued with some more out-on-a-limb ideas in the aluminum foil roll hydrolysis trace transmutation efforts.

The latest is "Pixie 18" - a fairly typical recipe with about .2M KCl:H2O and 10ml of D2O added as kicker.  However to this bucket, I added about 30g of water soluble tungsten oxide chloride, to add a large atomic number atom into the blend.

As I had seen a while back when I had added some potassium chromate, the presence of the additional alloying species seems to limit the degree of hydrolysis.  With this latest, the magnitude of gas evolution was minimal - with slightly over 1 liter of water hydrolyzed in 96 hours of time before it all began to peter out.

I took the usual snippets of foil from inner and outer roll surfaces, and have been looking at them with EDS, snooping out any traces of new species.  Some of the usual low level oddities, such as sub 1% peaks for Ni, Ce, S, and clear signals for the expected components of Al, O, K, Cl, W, Fe.  However, this time, whereas it has not been evident in earlier runs, there MAY be some viable signal for Au.

Its a daunting task,  but the L alpha and M alpha Au peaks look real, with highest values around .8% atomic.  The usual suspects of course must be dealt with - the nearness of W and Au peaks to each other and the presence of gold in the microscope cavity anyway.  But keeping my spot sizes and count rates in-line, and checking out some control samples at similar conditions, it looks like it's a "signal"

Obviously, the mere mention of Au as a low energy or anomalous transmutation product will raise eyebrows like no other element on the periodic table.  But I seem to recall nevertheless that it has been seen on cathodes as an unusual product.  Any specific citations?

More to come...

nr