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Room-Temperature, Small-Scale Fusion at UCLA
gnuman99 writes "A UCLA collaboration (Seth Putterman, Brian Naranjo and Jim Gimzewski) appear to have developed a fusion device powered by a pyroelectric crystal, a type of crystal used in cell phones to filter signals. When heated, such a crystal produces a large electric charge on its surface. The UCLA researchers placed a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal so that one side touches a copper disc. A tiny tungsten probe is then placed at the center of the copper disc. When the crystal is subsequently heated, a very large large electric field is produced at the end of the tugsten tip, ~25 billion volts per meter. This field gradient is so high that it strips the electrons from nearby deuterium atoms. The ionized deuterium atoms then accelerated by this field towards a solid target of erbium deuteride (ErD2). They collide with it at such high energies that some fuse with the target. A measurement of almost 900 neutrons per second was observed. This is 400 times the background! Although the amount of energy produced in this initial experiment was miniscule (~1E-8 jules), this technology could be used for things like microthrusters. There are pictures and movies on the UCLA's physics site." Reader richmlpdx adds a link to coverage at MSNBC.
The most technical summary I have ever seen. Did they finally replace the approvers with a monkey?
A UCLA collaboration (Seth Putterman, Brian Naranjo and Jim Gimzewski) appear to have developed a fusion device powered by a pyroelectric crystal, a type of crystal used in cell phones to filter signals. When heated, such a crystal produces a large electric charge on its surface. The UCLA researchers placed a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal so that one side touches a copper disc. A tiny tungsten probe is then placed at the center of the copper disc. When the crystal is subsequently heated, a very large large electric field is produced at the end of the tugsten tip, ~25 billion volts per meter. This field gradient is so high that it strips the electrons from nearby deuterium atoms. The ionized deuterium atoms [are] then accelerated by this field towards a solid target of erbium deuteride (ErD2). They collide with it at such high energies that some fuse with the target. A measurement of almost 900 neutrons per second was observer. This is 400 times the background! Although the amount of energy produced in this initial experiment was miniscule (~1E-8 jules), this technology could be used for things like microthrusters. There are pictures and movies on the UCLA's physics site."
Do the editors even look at these things anymore?
That's kind of what people said about electrons and X-rays...about 150 years ago.
So think about that.
Going briefly over the available documents on this, it appears that this technique consumes orders of magnitude more energy than it produces. This would preclude energy generation as one of the potential applications, which is usually regarded as the most promising potential application of cold fusion. Most of the other potential applications mentioned in the articles use this as a neutron generator, but there are other well known ways of achieving that...
It's a fun physics experiment, but I don't think it is much use in the economic driven world.
That's an interesting conclusion to come to without getting the answers to your questions.
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Seriously, except for the minor grammar/spelling error with "observer" (which is just a typical miss for our dear old editors here), this was a quality post with quality information and no question, news for nerds! If Slashdot could maintain this sort of quality (and perhaps even correct the spelling and grammar errors), I would be a much happier reader.
"The experiment did not, however, produce more energy than the amount put in"
So, how is this useful from a fusion / energy source standpoint?And why is it that every new American invention these days has a "potential use" in homeland security? There must be plenty of money wasting away in that crappy program right now if every single scientist talks about it whenever they release new findings. I'm off to begin building my CompuMegaInterCorpHomelandSecurity company now... (I figure with a name like that, how can the VC's NOT trust me with googleplexes of money?!!)
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Well firstly there are other applications for fusion besides power production (such as neutron sources for imaging, detection, etc.).
Secondly, with regard to power production, every fusion experiment adds a piece to the puzzle, even if that particular device setup will never be used to generate power. Most large-scale fusion experiments that have been performed, in fact, had no intention of generating power. They merely wanted to push the boundaries of what was known about fusion, and what could be engineered with current technology. So I would say that experiments that don't directly involve power production are nevertheless useful in that they advance the state-of-the-art in terms of what is known about fusion processes.
I don't see how any of these new advances in achieving fusion bring us closer to use of fusion as power source.
That's science for ya: most of the experiments seem useless at first. Many of them are useless forever. But sometimes we discover something amazing, and sometimes the results of 100 experiments together finally get us some new technology or insight. We scientists don't know, at the outset, what will turn out to be the "next big thing"... so we just search and see what happens...
"...the technique could have potential uses in medicine, spacecraft propulsion, the oil drilling industry and homeland security"
These guys are smarter than I thought, looks like they're hitting all the current administration's keywords. Does it also reduce taxes and support the traditional definition of marriage?
But hey, perhaps it might be a good helium generation technology, depending on how efficient it can be made... For those who don't know, the world is facing a shortage on helium. Most of the world's supply is found in Kansas, Texas and Wyoming mixed in with natural gas or oil. It's necessary for various industries and sciences, such as calibrating instruments and welding aluminium.
I'd guess that lowering the temperature of Natural gas to -300F so that everything but He is liquified is pretty darn inefficient. Maybe it'll be a good source for pure He3 too--if indeed that's what it created--and by the fact that it gave off a neutron that's my guess.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
every project final report had to mention possible military applications
That's kind of depressing... why didn't they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?
Then students would pursue projects with this in mind, instead of developing with military applications in mind. Highly reliable and easy-to-repair water pumps, improved farming tools constructable from local materials, simple and effective water filtration devices, etc.?
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That's kind of depressing... why didn't they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?
We are evolved from predators. Weapons research is what allowed us to become what we are today.
I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses. The primates who survived to become the ancient people who survived to became us were the ones who conquered and subjugated. Evolution selected their DNA sequences to be the ones that constructed your brain and mine.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Even if the technology is found to be unable to produce sufficient amounts of energy to be valuable in that role, it could still be a great platform for studying fusion in the lab, and it could yield useful information for controlling fusion in the large scale research reactors that may eventually lead to scalable, cheap, and abundant energy production.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
This post shows a missunderstanding towards the theory of evolution which does not surprise me considering the creationism/evolution debacle as it stands in US education.
To put it bluntly, what has allowed us to become what we are today has much more to do with hygene. Just look at third world countries, their hygene level and child mortality.
Now I won't begrudge you that aggression features largely in the human male psyche, and that that has had an evolutionary effect. However, the way evolution works means that a single individual who comes up with military or hygenic applications does not mean that they have a larger chance of procreation: what matters to women is status, what matters to men is nubility. So it is the women who look like they can bear lotsa children and the men who have status (which is more usually the people who control the people who think up military/agricultural/hygenic applications, not the people who actually think up that stuff!) who contribute to the gene pool.
"I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses"
I do, very much. It's actually only since the first world war that military application of science has been pushed by those in power. Sure, you have Leonardo da Vinci et al, but usually in schooling the military was tactics etc, not application of science. But now we get grade shcool kids being pushed into a military mindset by the powers that be in the US. 'Cause this sure aint happening in the Netherlands, and I would almost say in Europe as a whole.
When grandparent mentioned this was happening in school, of all places, it did make a lot of recent history make sense...in a very scary way. 'cos it isn't military power which is gonna bring peace to the world: it's people all over the world having a comfortable standard of living which is gonna do that.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I don't think you're cynical enough.
World peace is only achievable through some form of population control - once everyone has a decent standard of living we either need to go to space or prepare for another population boom like there is in China / S. America. We don't have enough fresh water for another boom like this. We also don't have enough oil to run the food gathering process. Military power is going to become rather drastically important in the future if something is not done to curb our population problems.... I hate to say it, I hate to believe it, but it's becoming more and more true. Europe has managed to keep a moderately steady population, and more power to them, but they have enormous problems with a dozen things that are related to other people having bred more than them.
And since major religions and governments aren't as peacefully minded as you are, you're completely wrong about how peace is going to come along. Look at the Catholic Church and their new pope.
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Then students would pursue projects with this in mind, instead of developing with military applications in mind. Highly reliable and easy-to-repair water pumps, improved farming tools constructable from local materials, simple and effective water filtration devices, etc.?
You say that like those aren't military applications, I think perhaps your out of touch with what modern military actualy does. Demonizing anything military is easy, and the people who do it the most are the people who don't realize that it's the military's infrastructure that make most humanitarian relief operations possible. Next time you think somebody needs 10,000 tons of relief supplies ask FedEx what the going rate is, and if they drop it off in a hostile fire zone.
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I disagree, politely of course.
/karma bonus removed for being offtopic.
Hygiene was certainly an important factor. But animals don't develop that on its own. Humans needed it because they started clustering together into large groups, which meant that if everybody in the city used the river as a sewer, it was enough to make it unhealthy to drink.
So why did we cluster into villages? To pool resources certainly, but also for mutual protection from other groups of humans. Castle walls and other heavy construction weren't invented to keep out wandering bears.
Even now we are mostly driven by instinct and emotional reactions. If you or I were a monkey living peacefully in the rainforest, we'd have pretty much everything that those things tell us we want: food, a place to live, and one or more mates. Maybe if we got really hungry and couldn't find what we usually ate, we'd sharpen a stick to get some grubs out of the ground.
There's no incentive for an animal in that situation to start using its brain and invent more advanced tools, society, or hygiene.
It isn't until a threat is introduced that those animals would set the wheels of invention in motion. If there is a, I don't know, tiger infestation in the rainforest and the tigers are eating your friends, then you get together and come up with a club or stone knife to fight back with.
Now you're back at equilibrium WRT invention. You've got all the things you wanted before, and in addition you can protect yourself from dangerous animals.
It's not until various groups of people start competing and fighting with each other that there is a reason to keep inventing, because humans are constantly outdoing each other in terms of ways to inflict harm on their enemies.
The humans that were better at that survived, and the ones that weren't didn't. Which brings us back to my original post.
Do I like this idea? Not really. I already knew the human race was flawed, but thinking it over a few weeks ago made me think of something else: extraterrestrial civiliations.
I liked to think that if there were any, they would be peaceful, or at least neutral. But I can't see any way for docile races to evolve into advanced societies.
So now I think about the silence of the radio spectrum in our galaxy, and it makes me wonder if Drake's equation needs a 100% for the variable that describes the probability of advanced civiliations destroying themselves.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
If you had said this in 1945, you would have been a visionary.
Well, except the part about Europe managing to keep a pretty steady population. In 1945, of course, you would be focussed intently on the results of one of the population control techniques you mention.
Still, this is one of the more insightful comments I've seen about the future. This lucky planet was one thing - an egg. The white was inside the shell and the yolk was spread over the outside, but otherwise this analogy is apt. We had enough energy stored here to evolve, establish technology and find someplace where energy is more plentiful from which we could conduct our experiments into the true nature of reality, enjoy each other and build beautiful and awesome things. If we do not do this before we expend all the resources on Earth, humans die.
This truth needs to be fully understood by every person on Earth, and all of us need to be working to solve the problem and move to the next level. If we cannot do that, humanity fails.
Our "leaders" who are more interested in handing money back to their supporters (Santorum, what's up?) are guilty of the worst kind of subject-changing which puts our genome at risk. Until this sort of conversation does not sound crackpot, we as a whole are well and truly fucked. Have you ever heard a politician mention any of this stuff? Do you expect to? (That cynical enough for you?)
-vvj
This is meant as a polite reply, but it will seem harsh. My appologies, but nonetheless:
/ditto, but it's still an interesting aside nontheless :).
Read my post. Read up on evolution. I've already agreed with you that agression has been a force in evolution, and in certain parts of the world (large tracts of africa, wherever there is conflict) it still is. In develloped countries it is actually a negative: the violent and aggressive get locked up (and don't make enough money to pay for surgery and other medical attention, further limiting the spread of his genetic heretige).
The guy who invents military applications recieves a steady paycheck, which grants him a small amount of status. The guy who owns the company who employs the aforementioned guy gets all the status, gets to fuck around with a large number of nubile women, and spreads his genetic seed the widest. Same goes for rockstars or rich people. Cynical? Yup....but too true. Geeks do not breed well. We don't contribute too heavily to the genetic pool. There is a big difference between agrression and the capability to think up new means to commit larger forms of aggression. Just look at Bush. He can be aggressive (as long as it isn't physical), but do you see him thinking up a new weapon system? But I bet he could have any Whitehouse intern he wanted.
I have to say I kinda agree with a lot of your post, but I remain convinced that Darwin and Gould will back me up on the way evolution works: it does not promote thinking of science as applied to military application, even though it might select towards application of military force (which is a totally different thing entirely).
Thus forcing kids to think of military applications is an entirely forced-from-above thing to do, not something which is somehow 'genetically enforced'. And it's still a horrible thing to force kids to do, IMNSHO, as it directly canals a childs thought processes into applications of agression.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Oh, I'm not saying that militaristic scientists get all the girls =). I think we agree more than you realize.
The people who develop weapons are a tool themselves. My point is that they're a tool that gets used and rewarded in small or large ways by the people in power, who *are* aggressive.
So my hypothetical cycle is:
1) Aggressive people get into power.
2) Several groups like this conflict with each other.
3) Those who do not fight, or cannot fight, are slain, or leave the area and are no longer a part of this particular genetic equation.
4) The people in power find someone smart to invent a stronger sword or a thicker castle wall that helps them win the war, usually involving giving the researchers trinkets of some kind.
5) The people in power take the conquered for their own and spread their aggressive DNA into the future.
6) Repeat.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You say that like those aren't military applications
Just because the military is involved in getting aid relief to combat zones doesn't make a water purifier a military tool. Nor is a reliable water pump the kind of military applications the original poster's school had him think up.
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You're an idiot. The goal is to produce neutrons. This research, while expanding our knoledge of fusion and giving more researchers a fusion source, will never result in power generation.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
You should be moderated as funny or clueless, or perhaps both.
In case you haven't been paying attention for the past couple of centuries, and apparently you haven't, governments create the crisis, the military usually just ends up having to clean up the mess.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
Actually, famous troll is http://slashdot.org/~OOG_THE_CAVEMAN
OOGG not worthy to carry OOG's club, IMO.