Eur. Phys. J. D 47, 157-170 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2008-00021-7

Kinetics of muon catalyzed fusion processes in solid H/D mixture

¹ Faculty of Fuels and Energy, AGH University of Science and Technology, 30059 Krakow, Poland
² Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, 141980, Russia
³ Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, 30059 Krakow, Poland

Corresponding author: ^a filipow@agh.edu.pl

Received: 4 August 2007
Revised: 6 January 2008
Published online: 20 February 2008

Abstract

This paper presents the final results of an experimental study of the kinetics of the muon catalysed fusion (MCF) in solid hydrogen-deuterium mixtures (H/D) at a temperature of 3 K. The experiment E742 was carried out on a TRIUMF meson facility in Canada. Four exposures were performed at different deuterium concentrations in the H/D mixture: c_d = 0.0005, 0.02, 0.15 and 0.75. A simultaneous analysis of the measured time distributions of the 5.5 MeV γ-quanta and the 5.3 MeV conversion muons obtained from nuclear fusion in the pdμ molecule allowed to extract the values of MCF chain parameters in the H/D mixture: the fusion partial rates for different nuclear spin states of the pdμ molecule, and the pdμ molecule formation rate. The experimental data fitting procedure was conducted in two ways: using solely the analytical formulae describing the kinetics of the MCF processes in the H/D mixture, and the detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the entire experiment. The results obtained by these two methods are consistent with each other and confirm the existence of the Wolfenstein-Gerstein effect.