It was confirmed that nanometer-sized metal powder (atom clusters or simply clusters) can absorb an extremely large amount of deuterium/hydrogen atoms more than 300% against the number density of host metal. Within such clusters, the bonding potential widely changes from the center region to peripheral ones, so that the zig-zag atom-chains are always formed dynamically around the average positi...

Most of the biosphere was brought on the primitive Earth by an intense bombardment of comets. This included the atmosphere, the seawater and those volatile carbon compounds needed for the emergence of life. Comets were thrown into the inner Solar System by the strong perturbation induced by the growth of the giant planets’ cores. The bulk of the Earth’s bombardment came from those comets that a...

This article presents infrared absorption data of amorphous silicon alloys in which the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium have been substituted for hydrogen. Silicon–deuterium and silicon– tritium vibration frequencies are related to silicon–hydrogen vibration frequencies by simple mass relationships. The silicon–deuterium wagging vibration is broadened and blueshifted due to strong coupl...

The primordial abundance of deuterium produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) depends sensitively on the universal ratio of baryons to photons, an important cosmological parameter probed independently by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. Observations of deuterium in high-redshift, low-metallicity QSO Absorption Line Systems (QSOALS) provide a key baryometer, determining th...

Deuterium desorption and reaction between deuterium and oxygen to water has been studied on ultrathin vanadium oxide structures prepared on Pd(111). The palladium sample was part of a permeation source, thus enabling the supply of atomic deuterium to the sample surface via the bulk. Different vanadium oxide films have been prepared by e-beam evaporation in UHV under oxygen atmosphere. The struc...

We have developed a tunable source of Mie scale microdroplet aerosols that can be used for the generation of energetic ions. To demonstrate this potential, a terawatt Ti:Al2O3 laser focused to 2 x 10(19) W/cm2 was used to irradiate heavy water (D2O) aerosols composed of micron-scale droplets. Energetic deuterium ions, which were generated in the laser-droplet interaction, produced deuterium-deu...

In a recent investigation of solid D2 as a UCN source[1], it was surmised that the yield of UCN is correlated with the spin states of the deuterium molecules. Subsequently, detailed neutron scattering calculations and measurements of the UCN lifetime in mixtures of paraand ortho-deuterium quantitatively verified this conjecture.[2,3,4,5,6] The work we report here was motivated by our attempt to...

Deuterium annealing has been widely demonstrated to be an effective way to improve the hot-carrier reliability of MOS devices. In this paper, we present a thorough study of the effect of deuterium pressure on the characteristics and hot-carrier reliability of MOS devices. N-channel submicron MOS transistors were annealed in deuterium with various pressures, temperatures and annealing times. It ...

We propose an extension of ongoing research into deuterium detection with an eye toward developing a cheap, portable detector for use in field studies.