[NewCandle] Stretching (and hiding) nanosquiddies

[Nick Reiter]

Good morning, all,

Horace, thanks for the articles on squid forms!

There are some peculiarities with all of this, obviously, but some seem to have been right under my nose...

As I mentioned a week ago or so, when I examined the surfaces of the foil rolls in my KI salt hydrolysis bucket after the bubbling had died off, I found no traces of the squid.  Presumably they had been consumed in the maelstrom of hydrolysis reaction.

So I decided to set up a mini-version expressly for the purpose of bring together all the ingredients to see if I could grow more.  I did some back-calculating on molarity of the KI in the distilled water, etc.

In a polypropylene (same plastic as original bucket) 150ml beaker, I added 100 ml of .15M KI in distilled H2O.  This represents an exact 1:40 scale model.  To this I added a piece of aluminum foil (same brand) of 50cm2 area.  However, instead of rolling it into a tight roll or set of mini rolls, I left it as a folded tent shaped piece.  A piece of paper towel was placed over the beaker to keep dust out.  Now the foil was the only non-scaled variable.  In the original hydrolysis buckets, I use three 200ft rolls of foil, each sawed in half, with the cardboard tubes removed.  This of course was to provide the many turns of Casimir space where I had originally proposed some alteration of the hydrolysis would occur.  So in chemical terms, I had a mini-replication, but in terms of the mass of Al and it's recursive layered form, I did not.

Now here's the odd part - it has been almost a week, and the foil has been sitting quietly in its salty beaker, with no sign of green tint formation, darkening of the surface, and the beginning of bubbles.  With the large bucket roll version, the green hue began to grow within hours, and had just begun bubbling within about 24 to 36.  That was the point I snipped a sample and found the squid.

Temperature, lighting, and locale are all the same.  So what is the missing X factor?

In other news, I finished a run of the 11th recipe bucket, Pixie 11.  This was foil roll hydrolysis with cesium chloride as the salt, and 10ml of D2O added as a kicker.  Overall in rate and gas evolution, pretty similar to NaCl, however the gas bubbles when ignited with a lighter were muffled and weak, as opposed to the bright loud percussive bang from gas bubbles evolved in the KI bucket.  No off colors, no squid found.

EDS on foil sections looks interesting though.  In some spots on the surface of the inner turns, I have seen what appears to be signal up in the higher keV for Hf, Pt and Ir.  In the lower energies, I am also still seeing pretty clearly the presence of Na that by all assaying shouldn't be there.  Only repetitive checking of more locations will pprobably disclose with time whether the Hf and Pt metal signals are an artifact.  They are quite low on the visible count plot, despite some at% numbers >1%.  I would say the Hf looks closer to real at this point.  The CsCl bucket did seem to have a lingering heat effect, but as in past buckets, no radiation was detected with the GM counter.

Next bucket run coming up will be a replication of the KI squid run.

All the best,

nr