English

Power Spectrum Analyses of Nuclear Decay Rates

Nuclear Experiment 2014-11-21 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

We provide the results from a spectral analysis of nuclear decay data displaying annually varying periodic fluctuations. The analyzed data were obtained from three distinct data sets: 32Si and 36Cl decays reported by an experiment performed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), 56Mn decay reported by the Children's Nutrition Research Center (CNRC), but also performed at BNL, and 226Ra decay reported by an experiment performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany. All three data sets exhibit the same primary frequency mode consisting of an annual period. Additional spectral comparisons of the data to local ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, Earth-Sun distance, and their reciprocals were performed. No common phases were found between the factors investigated and those exhibited by the nuclear decay data. This suggests that either a combination of factors was responsible, or that, if it was a single factor, its effects on the decay rate experiments are not a direct synchronous modulation. We conclude that the annual periodicity in these data sets is a real effect, but that further study involving additional carefully controlled experiments will be needed to establish its origin.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1007.0924,
  title  = {Power Spectrum Analyses of Nuclear Decay Rates},
  author = {D. Javorsek and P. A. Sturrock and R. N. Lasenby and A. N. Lasenby and J. B. Buncher and E. Fischbach and J. T. Gruenwald and A. W. Hoft and T. J. Horan and J. H. Jenkins and J. L. Kerford and R. H. Lee and A. Longman and J. J. Mattes and B. L. Morreale and D. B. Morris and R. N. Mudry and J. R. Newport and D. O'Keefe and M. A. Petrelli and M. A. Silver and C. A. Stewart and B. Terry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.0924},
  year   = {2014}
}