11th Cold Fusion conference in Marseille

[TBenson]

2 weeks ago. Good stuff.

There was an interesting paper from a Brit physicist (a recent convert to the cold fusion cause). His conclusion is that a fusion reaction occuring inside a condensed metal lattice will vastly prefer the "cold" route (that is, it will be a D+D reaction that produces Helium4 and heat into the lattice... no neutron, no tritium, no gammas). He used a variation of electron band state theory. He finally said "not only is CF possible, it's demanded in cases of condensed materials". Yahoo.

Hope I can find an electronic copy...

[Richard Hull]

Of course, All this flies in the face of convention by any normal fusioneer's teaching, thinking and even reason for being!!!

In hot fusion, the D+D = He4 + 17mev gamma is an almost never happen, but much sought after reaction. A ratio of about 1:5000.

The thought of a D-D reaction producing a normal helium nucleus with just a bit of heat energy is so far beyond, theoretical teachings, that most refuse to consider that such a thing might happen.

This may be a case where folks are doing stuff so far out in front of theoretical physics that we might be using pocket warmers based on the process before science can figure out the why of it all.

This happened with X-rays and ealry nuclear radiation! Folks had watches that glowed in the dark and were receiving medical x-rays daily before physics felt like it had it all the workings of what was happening at the core level in the text books.

I often wonder if that the 1:5000 ratio still holds in condensed matter and the 14 mev still holds, but is excruciatingly released hundreds of thousands of pulsed IR or UV bursts or in a smaller shower of 1-3kev x-rays! The whole thing could be a bulk matter three hundred particle electron shell, lattice re-shuffling that we don't understand. All the energy would be distributed pretty much as heat within the matter with each such fusion.

Lots to mull over with little way to test the theories. Observations of results seem possible while doing it on command does not. Not what science likes. We are probably in an almost no test zone due to the bulk matter nature of the beast and the capricious nature of the reaction itself.

Richard Hull

[badflash]

The stuff I was just reading said the reaction was
D+D+D+D=>2He4 and this gives no gamma.
If cold fusion produced gamma rays, the experiments would be lethal.

[Richard Hull]

Gamma rays of low energy would not be lethal within bulk matter.
Only the classic 17 mev gamma would be.

The energy of the fusion is in some form and a measurable one. In hot fusion it is all well understood. There is a great gulf between the gamma seen in hot fusion of accepted science and what the cold fusion folks are seeing as a particle-less heat signature. Barring someone making and marketing a CF driven car, this latter issue must be explained in a cogent and demonstrable manner to be taken seriously.

The key questions is:

If CF is real and you have an active surface, approximately what percentage of the product is envolved in this new fusion?

If a lot, then the energy out per fusion can be quite small. However, If only there are only a tiny micro fraction of fusions per unit volume then it must involve rather large energy release per fusion. Then, we are forced to ask in what form is the energy released which can show up as heat in the material and yet no readily detectable particle release?

Richard Hull

[badflash]

Unless we suspend the law of conservation of mass & energy, how could the energy of fusing D to He be small? If the fused component is locked into a matrix the energy can be transferred without particle emission in theory, but the energy released would destroy the matrix.

[Richard Hull]

I too am skeptical, but watchful. We have calculated and observed d-d fusion only on the basis of hot fusion results. All the evidence points against CF, but then we don't know everything and there certainly is a lot of stuff left to discover, I am sure. If CF is a bizarre case which I would tend to believe on the surface of it, then it may well not be quantified in the normal sense that we, as normal scientifc minds, would like. Nature tends to do what it does without consulting us or our science. It just defies us to figure it all out.

For me, there is just too much experiment that points to new or interesting science albeit confused in the area of CF/CANR/ LENR.

With technology and science at the point it is today, all the easy, clear paths have be taken and explored. What is left are the chinks in the armour with little promise "up front", which normal scientists shun due to a near zero chance of funding. It is a rare scientist that self funds these days. Science and technology are now fully institutionalized.

Richard Hull

[TBenson]

Well put Richard. CF is a classic example of a natural process that might exist (personally I'm about 90% sure at this point) but is so deeply hidden, and so difficult to create...well, who knows how long it will take to figure it out. If ever.

There is so many of these out in the scientific world now. High-temp superconductors are an example of something that finally did reach the light of day, but could easily have failed if a few key things didn't happen.

On the optimistic side, there are some pretty good people working on hand-warmers, and they are making progress. Or that is what i've seen lately. But as you said, the theory will come long, long after the handwarmer.

[Hector]

If the process of cold fusion requires relatively little energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion effects of normal nuclei then won’t make sense that the released energy from such a reaction would be diminished as well. I mean this form of fusion sounds more like nuclear transmutation rather than what would normally be referred to as fusion.

Hector

[walter_b_marvin]

Well OK...

But I thought "cold fusion" people were looking at tunneling phemoninia at low probabilities. Pardon my ignorance, but a 4 nucleas event done buy tunneling would have a near non-existant probability I should think. Is there another mechanisim other than tunneling or collision at work to overcome the nuclear binding energy? What is the reaction mechinisim?

[erich_knight]

This is the best source I've found that makes clear the cold fusion claims:

SCIENCE OBSERVER
Confusion About Fusion
David Schneider

Newsflash: A simple method for achieving nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, has been devised. The requirements are so modest that fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen can readily be brought about with tabletop equipment.

click for full image and caption

The popular and scientific press carried much coverage of this achievement after the March 8, 2002, publication of a peer-reviewed report in Science by Rusi P. Taleyarkhan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and five colleagues, which described the means for generating fusion in a small glass vessel. Reporters from many newspapers and magazines—including The New York Times, Business Week, Scientific American, and the news bureau of Science itself—immediately probed the controversial question of whether the evidence was sufficient to conclude that fusion reactions truly took place. They described the observations and the counter-observations. They evoked memories of the cold-fusion debate of 1989. They examined the judgment of the editors of Science in accepting the paper. But even if one takes the above "newsflash" at face value, this information is, in fact, quite dated: A tabletop method for bringing about fusion in a small vessel became public knowledge on November 29, 1949, in a patent issued to Winfield W. Salisbury of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Commercial devices based on his patent have been in widespread use for decades.

Huh? If this is true, why so much excitement? The answer is that most people confuse nuclear fusion with power generation. So when a new method for bringing about fusion reactions is presented, as was the case in March, it is easy to start musing that it could be harnessed to generate power. Taleyarkhan's article reported no such achievement. Its importance lies in its claim to have generated fusion in a novel way: by imploding a bubble with sound waves, a technique known to generate high temperatures and brief flashes of light.

Although this phenomenon, called sonoluminescence, has been known for many decades, in recent years specialists have postulated that perhaps temperatures in the collapsing bubble can be made high enough to induce fusion. At least one private company, Impulse Devices of Grass Valley, California, is investigating ways that such imploding bubbles might be harnessed in a fusion power reactor. But the work of this small startup is still limited to computer modeling and trying to detect fusion neutrons from sonoluminescence. Although much hope may exist, no one has yet shown how to generate power this way.

Power generation from imploding bubbles would indeed be a phenomenal breakthrough. But that feat is considerably more demanding than just coercing hydrogen isotopes to fuse, which has been a relatively straightforward technical exercise since Salisbury's patent issued. In essence, all one needs is to arrange for ions of a heavy isotope of hydrogen, say deuterium, to be accelerated by an electric field so that they strike a target also containing a heavy hydrogen isotope. The required apparatus is not a liquid-filled flask but something more like an old-fashioned vacuum tube, which probably has something to do with why Salisbury assigned his patent to the Collins Radio Company. Whereas the experiment reported in March is controversial because the number of neutrons given off, the telltale marker for fusion, was relatively small (some skeptics would argue it is zero), commercial devices based on Salisbury's technique are called "neutron tubes" precisely because they give off these particles in copious amounts.

The chief use for neutron tubes is in the oil and gas industry. Lowered into an exploratory borehole, they emit neutrons, which interact with the various minerals and fluids present, giving off gamma rays. Analysis of this radiation in turn reveals information about the surrounding geological formation. One of the companies manufacturing neutron tubes for such purposes is Thermo MF Physics of Colorado Springs. Their offerings include a portable unit that sells for about $55,000. Asked whether tabletop fusion is a remarkable thing, Jack Reichardt, general manager of Thermo MF Physics, says, "Heavens, no; that's clearly not the case and never has been."

Interestingly, most producers of neutron tubes shy away from mentioning that their devices produce fusion reactions. Perhaps they are afraid their customers will subconsciously worry that pushing the wrong button will turn the instrument into an H-bomb. But not all companies are so reticent. One European firm, EADS, is advertising its "FusionStar FS-NG1 neutron generator," which, like standard neutron tubes, relies on electric fields to force heavy hydrogen isotopes together within a vacuum chamber. This device, however, uses a spherical configuration rather than a cylindrical tube.

How do the various techniques for tabletop fusion compare? In their attempt to fuse deuterium, Taleyarkhan and his colleagues reported that the number of 2.5-mega-electron-volt neutrons, an energy level characteristic for the fusion of deuterium, rose about 4 percent above background, with an estimated emission rate of some 104 or 105 neutrons per second. By contrast, the neutron tubes manufactured by Thermo MF Physics put out from 108 to 1011 neutrons per second. The specifications on the EDS device are for 107 to 108. Given such statistics, one might reasonably wonder why electric methods haven't been pursued in the quest for fusion energy. The answer is that they have been investigated, but so far all designs have fallen far short of what would be needed to produce more power than is consumed.

The problem with all these tabletop techniques is that they do not produce sufficient energy density. "That's the hard part," says Todd Ditmire, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Ditmire and colleagues developed yet another way to achieve tabletop fusion in 1999 using laser pulses to heat deuterium clusters. At the time he was careful to stress that his method did not open the door to fusion power generation. Ditmire believes that it is important to study the possibility of producing fusion with imploding bubbles, but he notes, "I don't see any obvious way that this could be scaled up to a scheme that would be interesting for fusion energy."

It's understandable that some of the newspaper and magazine reporters caught up in the frenzy were drawn into the supposition that any tabletop device that can achieve fusion must be a breakthrough. But it is curious that the editors of Science were not more circumspect in their coverage: A news article in the same issue that carried Taleyarkhan's controversial report indicated that although some labs are trying to achieve conditions for fusion using enormous lasers or powerful magnetic fields, "small-scale 'tabletop' fusion reactions, meanwhile, have remained far out of reach." Another commentary in that very issue, written by Fred D. Becchetti, a nuclear physicist at the University of Michigan, corrects that misstatement, noting that tabletop fusion devices are in routine use.

Becchetti's piece did, however, also somewhat confound facts in a way that exaggerated the import of the new work. He indicated that existing methods require either megavolt accelerators to fuse deuterium or "a special radioactive tritium (t) target and hence government licensing." In fact, deuterium fusion reactions can be easily achieved using a few tens of thousands of volts. This has been well demonstrated, even by amateur scientists, including Joe Zambelli, Jr., an enterprising undergraduate who constructed such a device recently over a summer break. When I spoke with Zambelli, he was attempting to increase his working level from 30,000 to 50,000 volts, which he expects will allow his homebrew machine to put out about a million fusion neutrons per second. But even at the lower level, his device, which sits on a wooden table in the family room of his parents' house, can generate 250,000 neutrons per second. The fact that fusion can be carried out on a small scale is, Zambelli notes, "nothing really amazing."—David Schneider

[mcg]

Re tunneling. Here is a short paper by Steven Koonin on the calculated rate. It was published in Nature in June, 1989. It was probably written in May.

It is interesting to read into papers on CF from this period because most people were still reserving judgement, and basically trying to figure out what was going on. By the end of that summer, opinion had hardened up on both sides, and the freewheeling "what if" speculation disappeared from the literature. Anyway, Koonin's calculation showed a reaction rate of 3 X 10^(-64) per second. It interested me that he got a much better result for p+d.




.

[badflash]

It doesn't matter what the method of fusion is, be it tunneling, hot fusion, etc. 2 dueterium atoms weigh more than 1 helium atom. Put the two together and the mass must go someplace. Unless this makes a new chargeless particle, it either doesn't happen, or is in the realm of magic.

[mcg]

I think Koonin's point was that tunneling was pretty unlikely.

As to the reasonable question of where the energy goes, the notion seems to be that it goes "into the lattice," a theory espoused by several people over the years, but chiefly and perhaps most effectively by Peter Hagelstein at MIT.

Here is a link to an article that touches on the subject.

http://www.wsoctv.com/technology/3037068/detail.html

The neutronless d+d => He-4 + gamma-but-where-is-the- gamma pathway is a frequenltly recurring theme and fascination in the CF community and it has been for some years -- it is not a novelty.

I think the fixation on that particular reaction is probably a long road to a dead end, but I also think it is best to remain agnostic until the sytem is better understood. There are in fact nuclear reaction products in the CF apparatus. Tritium, Helium-3, Helium-4. They got there, somehow.

[badflash]

I have no problem with the energy going into the lattice vs. as a photon. What I was trying to say is that around 17 mev MUST be accounted for in each reaction through mass or energy, no matter how the reaction takes place. The supposition that tunneling or some other low energy method would release less net energy would require a trip to an alternate universe. That was one of the ideas in "food of the gods" by Asimov, but I think such a proposal would require a different forum...

[Hector]

Silly question, but is there any evidence that demonstrates that gammas are being produced in CF reactions that give rise to He4?

The reason I ask is that if you don’t have neutrons like normal fusion than maybe there are no gammas either.

[mcg]

Jack, you are right. No question.

Tunneling through the Coulomb barrier was often urged in the spring of 1989 as a reasonable way to account for the (apparently) drastically reduced energy input requirement for deuterium fusion in the Pons-Fleishmann cell. At the time, most people were still willing to mentally experiment with the idea that d+d was in fact occurring in the CF cell.

(If tunneling is or was thought to somehow affect the output side of the ledger, I guess I missed this.)

But after the Koonin paper, the possibility of tunneling looked very remote. It began to appear that maybe there would be no way at all to fit the Pons Fleishmann result into conventional physics. In private conversations you began to hear undertones of suspicion and deep uneasiness.

About then, bonk, The New York Times published a front page photo of Pons and Fleishmann standing at their lab bench. Their apparatus was immersed in a plastic water bath. It looked like a washtub purchased at Target; Lettered with a wax pencil on the side of this washtub was the facetious label: “The U-1 Tokamak.” The “U” was for Utah.

I really think that photo in the Times did them in. Fifteen years later, we are still trying to sort through the bits & pieces.

You can’t help but notice the progress of concatenation in this science. We started with d+d. In the last few years, d+d+d, for which there is a really attractive rationale, captured a lot of attention. I did not go to Marseilles but I gather, from this thread, that someone has now presented d+d+d+d.

Maybe there is a trend here. But it seems to me there must be more plausible (and less obsessional) reaction systems to look at than these supernumerary fusions of deuterons. The lithium sixes and sevens in the cell might be up to something, for examples.

Best wishes for the Thanksgiving holiday

Michael

[walter_b_marvin]

re: mass

True the mass has to go someplace..... But if one one or two of these happen per second in a gram of material, it might have well as not hvae happened at all

[badflash]

Few, if any neutrons, few if any gammas are seen in cold fusion. There is helium and heat. With the amount of heat being reported, everyone in the lab would be dead if this were conventional fusion.

The reason some are figuring D+D+D+D is the conservation laws. This is sort of like why they came up with the carbon cycle on solar fusion to go from four hydrogen atoms to one helium. 4 deuts would form Be8 which would immediately fision into 2 He4's and no gamma. Li6+D would cause the same thing, so either could work.

I think the carbon cycle is pretty silly as it does not explain 1st generation stars that have no carbon.

[Richard Hull]

All of you folks have provide insightful and thoughtful responses. The CF/CANR/LENR community has gone over all of this many times in the many years. Lots of ideas, but no real significant neutron counts (thank god) and no real gamma counts either. Yet the transformations are confirmed by many teams. It is true that the components are in tens of parts per billion and in micro layers of surface material only. There is talk of a dielectric interface phenomena and about a million other shots in the dark. The issue is wide open and a lot of folks are working on it, but on either a self funded basis or on very limited laboratory budgets.

There is too much interesting science here to just be cast off.

I haven't heard much regarding the sono-fusion aspect that hit the journals a couple of years ago. The initial paper was poo-poo'd as the neutron measurement results of the orginal authors was called into question in a counter paper. Then a second high quality run was done by one of the original authors who teamed up with a neutron metrologist, which still showed neutrons over the background. Here the matter has rested so far as I can tell.

This is often the way in the world of bleeding edge science. If there is no cash payoff readily seen, you can forget decent funding. New and interesting science is not the business of business or venture capital..........It is in expectation of a payday.

Richard Hull

[3l]

Hi Gang:

So far all the methods are duds.
The tunneling method is so old it has moss on it.
What is neglected whenever I heard this theory is a lack of enough deuteron numbers to get the statistical yield they needed for power fusion. In a matrix all tunneling goes out the window because how do you do a mixed well equation? Murrey Gellman tried and failed. Feinman gave it a crack and put it down. Without the probability in hand it is a futile effort....period. EOS
The neutron target stuff gives good yield but a power source ?!
Not Likely!

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[walter_b_marvin]

Wouldn't be the first time somthing intuitive is mathametically intractable

[TBenson]

Just as a note...

In my experience there hasn't been much focus on tunneling as the mechanism for CF, in years. The 2 most vocal theorists are Scott Chubb and Peter Hagelstein. Their theories seem closest to experimental results (when I say "close" of course that means, within light-years, because nobody is really close yet).

Both theories work with resonance and/or coherance. The idea is that, when you pack large numbers of deuterons into a metallic crystal, those deuterons lose their electrons and become...essentially...a fluid that can move about in the material. This is well-known...D ions in palladium act like electrons in copper. They pool and flow.

If the temperature is low and the crystal size is very small (nanometers) then they can form a coherent state. Think Bose Einstein Condensate. They become a single huge wave function that in some ways reacts as a whole.

If there is, let's say, a million atoms in this coherent form, then the colombe barrier can be overcome. Here is my very imperfect mental image: a million Ds "slosh" to one side and encounter a barrier (the edge of the crystal or some less permeable material). The mass of the million momentarily presses down on a pair of Ds at the edge of the pool. That overcomes the barrier for that pair and they fuse.

When this happens, because of the nature of Ds in this state, the D+D = H4 pathway is vastly preferred. I don't understand why, but it's been explained to me that the mathematics shows this. The same math shows that the energy will not be spit out as a gamma ray, as in a D+D in vacuum reaction, but instead the energy will be spread across the entire million-atom mass, and therefore passed to the surrounding matrix.

As for the D+D+D+D reactions, nobody is really sure about them. If they happen, it would be some variation of the above scenerio. Same goes for the D+D+Mo and other reactions that people appear to see, where the host metal matrix is transmuted UP a few atomic weights. The idea is, when you have a million-D coherent fluid, it is able to overcome the colombe barrier in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

That's my very primitive and incomplete understanding of the current state of CF theory. Please correct any parts of it that are misleading.

Finally, I'd like to point something out. The reaction described above can exist in nature and we'd never see it. It might be occuring, right now, in every ion-beam experiment in every nuclear science department in the world, and in every fusor every built, and we'd never see it. The rates of H4 production are far too small to be caught and there is no ionizing radiation to create a detectable signature. It's invisible. The only clue would be a very miniscule amount of excess heat that would show up in every experiment. But nobody looks for such heat.

This is why I have kept involved in CF. It looks to me like the ONE place in the nuclear world where there MIGHT be something unexpected, that would have been "missed' in the past century of work.

There are some other fun questions. For example, if this type of very low-level trace nuclear reaction does occur in nature, where would it occur? Maybe in metals in the heart of planets? So, where does the heat come from that shines out from Jupiter, and that powers the core of Earth?

Is such a reaction does occur, and it tends to create heavier and heavier atomic nuclei (it's a random fusion reaction that sometimes involves heavier matrix nuclei) then could we speculate that heavy elements are being created all the time, in the cores of planets? Would that be another way to explain the heavy elements in the universe, instead of the SuperNova theory?

This is all rank speculation. But that's whay makes it fun.

[Richard Hull]

Thanks for the thoughs Tom. You and I are not far appart on CF. The big players like the Chubbs and Hagelstein have a lot of time invested on the issue and superlative backgrounds to do the theoretical work. I am about 78% sure there is something real going on here. I think it lies inbetween the world of chemistry and nuclear physics. I always felt that there was too big a gulf between the two. There is a natural gulf needed, of course, as we observe no readily obvious linkage in casual investigations. The history of unusual results in this area can be traced in scientific papers back to the early 20th century. Like most papers, they just were ignored, when published.

This is nobody's fault, it is just the way of the world. It usually works out that once something is clearly seen and presented, a tortured paper trail of related and "hinted at" papers can be researched and belched up from the literature.

Richard Hull