Google (UBC/MIT/LBNL) post Nature updates.

Links please.

Quote from JedRothwell

If the theoretical path is wrong, how can they get positive results? They are treating cold fusion as if it were plasma fusion in disguise. They seem to be looking for plasma fusion products such as neutrons, which cold fusion does not produce. If we are right, these projects are doomed to failure.

One might contend that Fleischmann and Pons were on the same track, and this did not prevent them to find positive results. Many are still finding results with a standar model mindset, I know this won't alllow real progress, but has been enough to fuel the Cold Fusion renaissance we are now discussing here.

Quote from Alan Smith

They are standard model fixated, looking for the keys under the lamp-post, because that's where the light is. Unfortunately, the keys are somewhere they won't even acknowledge exists.

Totally agreed, but in this case they are still finding the smell of the keys, so to speak.

Quote from Alan Smith

Links please.

I think this is the one:

https://www.pasj.jp/web_publish/lam1998/A18a06.pdf

It takes some googling. I thank Ahlfors for giving enough clues to some effective googling.

Quote from Curbina

I think this is the one:

Do you smell the cheese? 1998? .. A bit younger than SM (age 100 years last 40 years desperate..)

As said: If one feeds money to old cows you won't get new milk...

I think Ahlfors is pointing out that this LCF concept NASA, and now the Berlinguette Group are studying, has been around since at least 1998.

Some might say it goes back to 1935...this is the root of iit.

The Oppenheimer–Phillips process or strip reaction is a type of deuteron-induced nuclear reaction. In this process the neutron half of an energetic deuteron (a stable isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron) fuses with a target nucleus, transmuting the target to a heavier isotope while ejecting a proton. An example is the nuclear transmutation of carbon-12 to carbon-13.

The process allows a nuclear interaction to take place at lower energies than would be expected from a simple calculation of the Coulomb barrier between a deuteron and a target nucleus. This is because, as the deuteron approaches the positively charged target nucleus, it experiences a charge polarization where the "proton-end" faces away from the target and the "neutron-end" faces towards the target. The fusion proceeds when the binding energy of the neutron and the target nucleus exceeds the binding energy of the deuteron itself; the proton formerly in the deuteron is then repelled from the new, heavier, nucleus.[1]

Oppenheimer–Phillips process - Wikipedia

Quote from Alan Smith

s the deuteron approaches the positively charged target nucleus, it experiences a charge polarization where the "proton-end" faces away from the target and the "neutron-end" faces towards the target.

Someone belatedly did some calculations.. 60 yrs later

but Wikipedia didn't know

Thus at low energies deuteron polarizability effects are negligible, or in other words the Oppenheimer-Phillips process seems to be ineffective and not able to explain the suppression o fneutron-producing reactions in ‘‘cold-fusion’’-type experi-ments @16,17#.

It is important to realize, however, that even if polarization effects were several orders of magnitude larger,the drastic decrease of the cross sections due to the Coulomb penetration factor would still prevent any appreciable enhancement to be noticed

(18) (PDF) Nonexistence of the Oppenheimer-Phillips process in low-energy deuteron-nucleus collisions. Available from:

https://www.researchgate.net/p…uteron-nucleus_collisions [accessed Jul 21 2023].

Quote from RobertBryant

Thus at low energies deuteron polarizability effects are negligible,

Even thinking of such an effect is inventing fairy tales.

First the standard model monks have to explain how in a neutral nucleus charge should evolve!

A neutral nucleus is EM flux only and does not follow a symmetric PP* logic used since the man of garbage (Dirac) entered physics. Nuclear excess flux is PP*P** - a tripple higher dimensional wave what has been proven by e+/e- annihilation experiments delivering 3 photons.

See:: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08588

'The Thunderbird Reactor delivers D+ sourced from a “plasma thruster” (vide infra) through a vacuum chamber towards the palladium target. A dedicated power supply with an applied voltage (“sheath voltage”) selectively accelerates the D+ into the target. As the beam of incident D+ loads deuterium into the palladium target (“Phase I”), the rate of neutron production increases for a period of time, before reaching a constant rate of neutron production. This experiment represents the first demonstration of PIII-induced D-D fusion. We also demonstrate that while maintaining an incident beam of D+ on the palladium, electrochemically loading the palladium with deuterium from an adjacent electrochemical cell (“Phase II”) further enhances D-D fusion events by >10%.

This experiment provides direct evidence that the electrochemical loading of a metal target at the eV energy scale can increase nuclear fusion rates at the MeV energy scale.'

This strikes me as an elegant experiment. Submitted to Nature.

https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-5046357/v1/a90c6621c916b1f04215778f.pdf

ETA: This is probably best moved to the Google thread.

Quote from JedRothwell

I think Alan Smith posted this somewhere here, but anyway, here it is again:

Electrochemically-enhanced nuclear fusion of deuterium

Curtis Berlinguette, Kuo-Yi Chen, Phil Schauer, Sergey Issinski, and 11 more

This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5046357/v1

Abstract
The ultimate goal of nuclear fusion research is to achieve a reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. Fuels such as deuterium need to be confined to increase the collision probability of particles. We therefore set out to investigate whether electrochemically loading a metal lattice with deuterium fuel could increase the probability of nuclear fusion events. Here, we report a benchtop fusion reactor that enabled us to bombard a palladium metal target with deuterium ions. These deuterium ions undergo deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion reactions within the palladium metal. We showed that the in situ electrochemical loading of deuterium into the palladium target resulted in a 15(2)% increase in D-D fusion rates. This experiment shows how electrochemical reactions at the eV energy scale can impact nuclear reactions at the MeV energy scale.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5046357/v1

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Where can we discuss this experiment as this news thread is not for discussion. The experiment makes sense to me as does the results, i.e. electrochemically load more deuterium into the palladium target => get more fusions by the same percentage increase in deuterium density in the loaded Pd target. Please point me to a discussion as I want to make sure I am not missing something. I.e. is this surprising and/or does it somehow confirm our usual LENR deuterium loaded Pd experiments? Thank you.

Quote from anonymous

Where can we discuss this experiment as this news thread is not for discussion. The experiment makes sense to me as does the results, i.e. electrochemically load more deuterium into the palladium target => get more fusions by the same percentage increase in deuterium density in the loaded Pd target. Please point me to a discussion as I want to make sure I am not missing something. I.e. is this surprising and/or does it somehow confirm our usual LENR deuterium loaded Pd experiments? Thank you.

Post

RE: Google (UBC/MIT/LBNL) post Nature updates.

'The Thunderbird Reactor delivers D+ sourced from a “plasma thruster” (vide infra) through a vacuum chamber towards the palladium target. A dedicated power supply with an applied voltage (“sheath voltage”) selectively accelerates the D+ into the target. As the beam of incident D+ loads deuterium into the palladium target (“Phase I”), the rate of neutron production increases for a period of time, before reaching a constant rate of neutron production. This experiment represents the…

orsova

Sep 29th 2024

Just moved two posts that pertain to this thread as requested. This is the proper place to discuss the latest Berlinguette preprint.

Hi Ahlfors Hope you had a nice holiday- we missed you. Here's a link to that paper- free download.

sorry- you did it already.

I just been meaning to comment that this paper is a follow up of this groups work that has (since right after the 2019 Nature paper) mantained that even tho they were unable to replicate the original claims of F and P, they have been able to increase neutron production at will, which for them was completely important and noteworthy result, and which they seem to keep improving.

Quote from orsova

'The Thunderbird Reactor delivers D+ sourced from a “plasma thruster” (vide infra) through a vacuum chamber towards the palladium target. A dedicated power supply with an applied voltage (“sheath voltage”) selectively accelerates the D+ into the target. As the beam of incident D+ loads deuterium into the palladium target (“Phase I”), the rate of neutron production increases for a period of time, before reaching a constant rate of neutron production. This experiment represents the first demonstration of PIII-induced D-D fusion. We also demonstrate that while maintaining an incident beam of D+ on the palladium, electrochemically loading the palladium with deuterium from an adjacent electrochemical cell (“Phase II”) further enhances D-D fusion events by >10%.

This experiment provides direct evidence that the electrochemical loading of a metal target at the eV energy scale can increase nuclear fusion rates at the MeV energy scale.'

This strikes me as an elegant experiment. Submitted to Nature.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5046357/v1

https://assets-eu.researchsqua…c6621c916b1f04215778f.pdf

ETA: This is probably best moved to the Google thread.

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This is great progress, let's hope it gets through there review process.
It is quite elegant and if they can get the plasma/ionic/em wave geometry right with the apparatus, it could be an excellent way to provide power and thrust.

However, I do worry about the decay products in a gas and metal walled apparatus.
It seems to me that it could pose problems to biological health?
This might make impractical for domestic grid power.

Great find everyone!
🍻

"While this experiment represents the first inconvertible example of electrochemistry directly increasing

nuclear fusion rates [34,35], the Thunderbird Reactor produces a neutron yield equivalent to merely

10^–9 W with 15 W of input power"

So we need to increase fusion cross section; or instead capture the neutrons for other fusions or fissions by a factor of 1.5e10.

I think we (LENR collectively) can do better eventually as they earlier in their paper compare the magnetic and inertial confinement deuteron densities:

"Magnetic and inertial confinement fusion typically achieve fuel densities of approximately 10^20 m^−3 and 10^31 m^−3,

respectively, where the latter density exists for only hundreds of picoseconds [4–6]. It is therefore notable that a deuterium fuel density of 10^28 m^−3"

The paper is good scientific progress and it is what I would expect, i.e. no new physics here, just ordinary fusion in a metal target.

(Sorry for the ugly formatting of the copy and paste from their paper.)

Quote from anonymous

i.e. no new physics here, just ordinary fusion in a metal target.

Indeed, this is the old "how we can smash things together to fuse" now being explored within a lattice, much akin to the NASA LCF approach.

I don't want to go too off topic here, but I think is important to do a little philosophical pondering.

I watched with much attention the IWHALM 16 presentation by Lutz Jaitner and took notice of the questions and answers session where the head of the CleanHME project, Konrad Czerski, seemed somehow startled and a bit offended by the mere mention of the idea that an EM effect could be of any more importance than a purely highly kinetic (thermal) effect to overcome the Coulomb barrier, to which Jaitner was very clear to state he was in complete disagreement. After all, Czerski is doing LENR research coming from the same absolutely mainstream point of view as Berlinguette, and therefore his research has much more in common with Berlinguette's that with Jaitner's.

Perhaps is not only the mainstream point of view the only reason why the idea of the plasmoids is so resisted in favor of the classic kinetic approach. After all, what Lutz Jaitner proposes is a still very mainstream quantum mechanics theoretical basis for explaining why a plasmoid forms and why these structures can have an ability to compress matter to cause nuclear reactions. Is a novel approach, but still rooted in mainstream ideas.

On the other hand, the approach by Bob Greenyer, being competely non mainstream, at the core can be seen as basically the same idea that Jaitner attempts to develop formally from Quantum Mechanics, but Greenyer does it from an almost purely phenomenological and observational point of view, without being constrained by a single theoretical frame of reference, and gathering evidence from a wide range of observations across many experiments, finding remarkable evidence of a common underlying phenomena across all the different experiments examined. .

Beyond the screening effect, Czerski isn't able to look further ahead.

Anyway, he has more than only one detractor..

Quote from Curbina

Indeed, this is the old "how we can smash things together to fuse" now being explored within a lattice, much akin to the NASA LCF approach.

I don't want to go too off topic here, but I think is important to do a little philosophical pondering.

I watched with much attention the IWHALM 16 presentation by Lutz Jaitner and took notice of the questions and answers session where the head of the CleanHME project, Konrad Czerski, seemed somehow startled and a bit offended by the mere mention of the idea that an EM effect could be of any more importance than a purely highly kinetic (thermal) effect to overcome the Coulomb barrier, to which Jaitner was very clear to state he was in complete disagreement. After all, Czerski is doing LENR research coming from the same absolutely mainstream point of view as Berlinguette, and therefore his research has much more in common with Berlinguette's that with Jaitner's.

Perhaps is not only the mainstream point of view the only reason why the idea of the plasmoids is so resisted in favor of the classic kinetic approach. After all, what Lutz Jaitner proposes is a still very mainstream quantum mechanics theoretical basis for explaining why a plasmoid forms and why these structures can have an ability to compress matter to cause nuclear reactions. Is a novel approach, but still rooted in mainstream ideas.

On the other hand, the approach by Bob Greenyer, being competely non mainstream, at the core can be seen as basically the same idea that Jaitner attempts to develop formally from Quantum Mechanics, but Greenyer does it from an almost purely phenomenological and observational point of view, without being constrained by a single theoretical frame of reference, and gathering evidence from a wide range of observations across many experiments, finding remarkable evidence of a common underlying phenomena across all the different experiments examined. .

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