11th Cold Fusion conference in Marseille

[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