Solar flares affect radiometric decay rates?

It would seem that if this is found to be a true phenomenon then the situation gets even worse for YECs because increased activity in the sun appears to be slowing down the decay rate slightly.

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Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.

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YECs need it to go faster

Isn't the sun slightly further away in winter?
At least it's at a lower angle to the horizon such that we don't get as much heat (and presumably less of whatever particles are hypothesized to cause this effect) from it

Edited by PurpleYouko, : No reason given.

When I first read of this i thought it was crap too. Just another set of bogus data reported in some half assed newspaper article.
But after doing a little more research I began to realize that the effect has been reproduced and very well documented in many well respected labs around the world.
It is largely accepted as a proven fact that this effect actually does happen.

If you haven't read about it yourself, this is as good a place as any to start http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2012/08/120813155718.htm
Yes I know it isn't a scientific journal but it does contain a lot of relevant information

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Researchers have recorded data during 10 solar flares since 2006, seeing the same pattern.

"We have repeatedly seen a precursor signal preceding a solar flare," Fischbach said. "We think this has predictive value."

The Purdue experimental setup consists of a radioactive source -- manganese 54 -- and a gamma-radiation detector. As the manganese 54 decays, it turns into chromium 54, emitting a gamma ray, which is recorded by the detector to measure the decay rate.

Purdue has filed a U.S. patent application for the concept.

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Citation please... I cannot find any reports from dozens of labs, or even a single lab other than the original suspects verifying this phenomenon. The only papers I can locate using google scholar were written by Jenkins and/or Fischbach. Searching the web is useless for the obvious reasons. Where is the data from a place other than Purdue or Stanford?

There doesn't seem to be a lot of research by other labs so far but here a few that I uncovered.
I did find one paper from the University of Berkeley in which they publish evidence against it
http://donuts.berkeley.edu/papers/EarthSun.pdf

The effect was reported in the news pages at the Stanford university web site and Purdue University website (as you are probably well aware) but I don't have access to the string of papers that were apparently published a few years back.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html
http://www.purdue.edu/...2010/100830FischbachJenkinsDec.html

A paper entitled "Additional experimental evidence for a solar influence on nu
clear decay rates" was published in 2012
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.5783v1.pdf
In this paper, data from 3 different sources were compared. BNL, PTB and the original data from Purdue

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data were analyzed from half-life measurements taken by two independent groups, one at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, USA, and the other at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, Germany.

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The paper also introduces a fourth set of data from The Ohio State University Research reactor

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The purpose of this article is to present 36Cl decay data collected at The Ohio State University Research Reactor (OS-URR), in Columbus, Ohio, USA, over the course of 7 years, which further strengthen the case for a solar influence on some nuclear decays.

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Jenkins also collaborated with the GSI (Geological Survey of Israel) to publish this paperhttp://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0205v1.pdf

Ok so it isn't "dozens" of labs. If i said that then I withdraw the comment.
In about a half hour of simply searching the web I have managed to uncover enough peer reviewed papers to include research teams at Purdue, Stanford, BNL(New York), PTB (Germany), GSI (Israel) and Ohio State.

That's 6 independent sets of data corroborating the possible effect and one attempting to debunk it.
I'm done searching for more data on this for now since I have other things to do.

One thing I would like to note here is that the data that that Berkeley used in their rebuttal was collected only once per day over the period. This is arguably not a good enough time resolution to see the effect accurately. I'm not saying they did it wrong, just that in the Ohio state paper they specifically noted that their data was collected over a four hour period each day.

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The 54Mn data were being collected as part of a half-life measurement
utilizing continuous four-hour measurements. This allowed a time resolution capable of seeing changes that could have been caused by a solar flare, which typically lasts minutes to hours.

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In particular what I was looking for was not just verifications of the effect, but verifications that you could actually predict solar flares using the effect. Those are the results you said were repeated by many labs so that the concept of predicting storms with radioactivity increases or decreases was pretty well accepted. I don't believe that statement to be correct.

Did I say many labs confirmed the predictive qualities of this data?
If I did then that was not my intent. All I ever meant to say was that many labs had confirmed that the effect does indeed happen.
Al I know about the predictive qualities of this is that researchers from Purdue have patented the concept of using decay fluctuations to predict solar flairs.

Seriously? Daily is not good enough for an effect that allegedly has an annual variation? I don't see any reason why daily measurements would not sufficient absent a daily variation of a similar or larger amplitude. Can you make an argument that it daily measurements of sufficient accuracy are insufficient?

I shouldn't need to make that argument since the quote in my previous post spells it out.
The point they make is that some solar flare events are only a few hours in duration so a resolution of one data point per day (not a single measurement presumably but several combined to a mean value. At least I hope that's what they mean) is not going to see such an event happen.
Their experiment just has a very low resolution so says nothing of short term fluctuations.
Surely you can't argue with the logic of that. It makes sense to me anyway.

Edited by PurpleYouko, : forgot to address part of the post first time around

I have a problem with that rationale. First, there is supposed to be an annual variation. As long as flares don't appear like clockwork, taking data once a day should be plenty of data for verifying an annual variation.

Certainly when looked at simply as a test of annual variation, the number of sample points taken per day is only relevant in terms of the premise that more data points is better than less data points.

Here is what you posted. Not sure what other interpretation to give: The Purdue team observed a drop in the decay rate a day and a half before a solar flare. This has since been reproduced by dozens of labs around the world and it is pretty well accepted that it does indeed happen. Nobody knows the cause yet though. It doesn't appear to be neutrinos or neutrons or any of the other obvious choices.

The only interpretation you can make here is the correct one.
I spoke (typed) too damn quickly without reviewing my data properly.
If I had bothered to dig a little deeper before posting I would have discovered that the reasonably well accepted fact was that there is fluctuation of a cyclic nature and not that other labs had been able to predict solar flares.

*presents wrists for a good slapping*

I also call bullshit.

I've been working with LASER ablation techniques in Mass Spectrometry for almost 20 years and this is the first time I have ever heard anybody spout such a load of rubbish about it.

LASERs ablate material by heating it to the point of vaporization whereupon it rapidly expands into the cooler gas surrounding the point of ablation.
The ablated material composes of a mixture of charged (both - and + ions) and neutral particles of various sizes (depending largely on the energy supplied by the LASER).

LASER Desoprtion is a technique used to directly ionize organic materials for introduction into a mass spectrometer. Different compounds accept different charges (some + and some -) when hit with a LASER. This is pretty well understood and is used to the analyst's advantage by only taking the negatively charged components into the mass spec while rejecting unwanted positively charged components. (can be reversed in some cases)
This is most typically used in MALDI and similar techniques

There is no pulling involved. It is more like an explosion.

The sum of positively and negatively charged ions coming from an ablation event are pretty much equal to the overall initial charge of the object being ablated. There will be a certain amount of loss though. Some electrons or protons may be lost or gained in interactions with the local environment.
This is especially true in a very high powered LASER where the point of ablation becomes a plasma

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Plasma is loosely described as an electrically neutral medium of positive and negative particles (i.e. the overall charge of a plasma is roughly zero). It is important to note that although they are unbound, these particles are not ‘free’. When the charges move they generate electrical currents with magnetic fields, and as a result, they are affected by each other’s fields. This governs their collective behavior with many degrees of freedom

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All the LASER supplies is heat.