| Abstract: | During investigations concerning technological applications, tritium was sorbed in small monocrystalline particles of titanium (φ ≈ 15 nm). When these preparations were heated to several hundred degrees centigrade, a strong decrease in the radioactivity of up to 40% was observed. The evaluation of several heating experiments done under quite different conditions rules out the possibility of trivial errors. Through evaluation of several gas-solid exchange and diffusion experiments done by others, in which radionuclides heavier than tritium (63Ni, 65Zn, 85Sr) were used as tracers, it could be shown that a strong decrease in the radioactivity also exists for these nuclei. A first attempt is presented to explain these striking results by a nuclear-pair hypothesis. Several straightforward experiments are proposed for further exploration of the phenomenon. |
