Slashdot Mirror
Cold Fusion Scientist Exonerated
Icarus1919 writes "New Scientist reports that the scientist who discovered a possible cold fusion reaction by bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sonic waves has recently been exonerated of accusations of scientific misconduct following the verification of his results by another scientist."
Where's the cold fusion? The article sounds more like Sonofusion. Which, I can assure you, is a long ways from "cold".
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The person accusing Taleyarkhan of misinterpreting data was one of his own post-docs. I wonder what that person has to say now? I think it's easy to make allegations and its difficult to shake the effects of false allegations.
First, the article title is VERY misleading. As others have pointed out, the question at hand is whether sonoluminescence can lead to fusion. In some peoples' minds, this is "cold" fusion, because the whole damned apparatus doesn't have to be a plasma. However, where the fusion is claimed to be taking place (in the middle of tremendously cavitating bubbles) *IS* in a plasma state (at least for part of an acoustic cycle). Thus, this might be better termed "locally hot" fusion or something. Or just "sonofusion", which everyone in the field seems to understand.
Second, the New Scientist blurb is interesting in that Rusi seems to have been cleared of scientific fraud. The question, if I remember correctly, was whether the neutrons he was seeing were due to poor experimental techniques, contamination (accidental or purposeful), or simply weren't there in the first place. This blurb SEEMS to clear him of accusations of purposeful contamination and just making up the existence of neutrons. However, it doesn't mean that they were really there, and certainly not that he's really found thermal neutrons from fusion in his experiments. THAT will take a whole lot more "confirmation".
(IAAP, but haven't been following this conflict closely. The last I paid attention was at the ASA meeting last December in Hawai'i. So I'm sure someone will correct my--- inadvertent---mistakes. This is, after all, Slashdot.)
Maybe they then can go back to their roots and produce food? Maybe a too obvious insight though...
Apparently, Purdue refused to state what the exact allegations investigated were, how many inquiries it conducted, or what its conclusions were based on. Hard to tell if the investigation's conclusions were arrived at fairly or were politically motivated. More details in this NYT article which I found from this blog entry.
No no... exonerated, not exhumed.
Ah, and here i thought exxonerated mean having a bunch of oil spilled on you.
Have you read my journal today?
The article says yes. Of course, low temperature fusion is already old hat anyway (Farnsworth Fusor.) The article doesn't say whether the reaction produces more energy than it consumes, which is what would make it interesting.
Because that takes effort, and this is Slashdot?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
So - the question of 'reputation': 'Hard to shake' the reports of a former team-mate? This is primary research, and the results are bloody testable. Screw reputation. This is cricism is expected, required and to be commended. Taleyarkhan is surely not surprised that folks are jumping on every issue that they can find. If his sonofusion is replicated then he will be a hero.
In life in general: *every* accuser of corruption is attacked as a liar. This is not fun - folks don't do this normally unless they really saw something worrisome. The accusation invariably gets themselves investigated as well, and usually by folks sympathetic to the accused. It is *not* easy to make allegations, and folks with even a hair of power constantly bury any and all criticism. Seriously, whistleblowing is not fun - not in academia, not in industry, not in public service, not in religious institutions... nowhere.
His research has been published and folks are replicating (and, of course, mostly failing to replicate) his results. Discussions of the results (and non-results) are ensuing. This is satisfactory science. He was mocked for leaving his name off of a couple of papers that were by *very* close colleagues, which is fair too.
Good news everybody...
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Or maybe it's been dumbed down for/by the press.
Physicists often over-simplify or inappropriately categorize things when trying to explain their papers to reporters (note that most journalism programs don't include courses on nuclear physics). Even if the reporter knows the difference between genuine cold fusion and sonofusion (keeping in mind that "cold" can be used somewhat ambiguously in regards to fusion), they might not expect their readers to and dumb it down themselves.
Most likely of all is the stereotypical Professor Frink sitting in his lab babbling excitedly away about how it works while the reporter sits there and nods. When he says something like, "While individual Alpha particles are created with energies of N electron-volts, the system temperatures are on par with hypothetical cold fusion scenarios," guess which two words out such a statement will actually get written down in the reporter's notes.
Taleyarkhan didn't claim he had caused cold fusion. He claimed sonofusion.
For all readers getting excited about Mr. Fusion and nuclear jetpacks, I hate to inform you that Taleyarkan's experiments, assuming they genuinely did induce fusion, fell far, far short of unity.
On a slightly off-topic note, for those who have not been following the details in the cold fusion field, some very persuasive evidence has emerged FOR the original cold fusion experiments (the Pons-Fleischmann style cold fusion using Palladium and Deuterium). The evidence was presented by researchers at the US Navy's SPAWAR labs late in 2006. The reserchers are highly experienced scientists who have taken their time and performed the experiments thoroughly. A description of the evidence is at http://www.newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET19.htm# ee.
Some of the biggest problems in cold fusion experiments has been long incubation periods, perhaps weeks/months, difficulty in calorimetry experiments for determining if heat was being generated, and replication.
Two techniques have been detailed by SPAWAR. The first is the using chemical co-deposition methods to combine Palladium and Deuterium, allowing a solid Palladium structure to form with Deuterium already 'mixed' in with it. Previously, weeks were often needed to allow absorption of Deuterium into the Palladium. Using the co-deposition technique, cold fusion effects become apparent within minutes, such as anomalous amounts of tritium, low-intensity x-ray radiation, and increased heat. This happens on a highly repeatable basis.
The second, highly outstanding experimental result is the use of nuclear industry standard CR-39 nuclear track detectors, which look like small pieces of plastic and are permently etched with tiny impact craters whenever a high energy nuclear particle hits them. Chemical reactions cannot produce the craters or tracks. The experiment involved placing a CR-39 track detector physically next to the Palladium-Deuterium electrode.
What resulted was the detection of some of the highest density counts ever seen on the detectors of high energy nuclear particles. Independent nuclear experts who have examined the CR-39 detectors recognized the signature tracks of protons and alpha particles, which, to be ejected from the atoms where they reside, require millions of volts - at least 1,000,000 times more energy than can be produced by any known chemical reaction. As a control experiment, exposed CR-39 detectors in a lithium solution without palladium in it resulted in only a sprinkling of tracks, randomly distributed and so few in number that they could be accounted for by background radiation.
The only surrounding energy sources were a few volts from the current applied through electrolysis; the second is an applied external electric field of about 6,000 volts. The particle tracks look identical to tracks made by nuclear particles that have at least 2 million electron-volts.
The really nice thing is is that you can almost see the tracks with your naked eye. Take the detectors elsewhere, to conferences etc, show others later; the tracks are permently etched evidence of nuclear reactions occuring in a Palladium-Deuterium benchtop setup.
The evidence here for Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion is now getting to the point where the scientific community has to seriously consider that Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion DOES exist under the right conditions, whether people want to accept it or not. Hard to replicate is not the same as impossible to replicate.
Well... not necessarily. You refer to Todd Rider's papers. Rider's general analysis is on quasineutral, isotropic nonequilibrium systems. For example, Farnsworth-Hirsh fusors are not quasineutral; they strive for only protons in the plasma. Polywell (Bussard's variant) is anisotropic. Rider addresses some exceptions in very general terms. For example, he discusses a plasma of protons (non-neutral), but only under pure magnetic confinement, and then decides that the Brillouin Limit rules it out for feasible magnetic field strengths. It's all quite applicable, but not a general critique of non-neutral plasmas.
Most of what Rider's papers discuss deals with the nonequilibrium aspect. That is, some fusion systems, fusion is attempted to be conducted at a lower energy by having a non-Maxwellian energy distribution in the plasma. That is, a Maxwellian plasma has most of the particles at a lower energy than the temperature would suggest, with the few high temperature outliers causing most of the fusion reactions. If you can only spend your energy accelerating particles to energies that stand a significant chance of fusing (without wasting it on bulk material that will still be too low energy), you can get a much higher rate of fusion. Rider goes on to show that, barring heavy use of selective removal of low energy particles for reacceleration, non-Maxwellian distributions of ion energies will rapidly decay to a Maxwellian equilibrium distribution. He also discusses energy loss mechanisms, and how formidable they are. In a later paper, he discusses more specific fusion systems and the problems inherent in them, and then proposes several possible systems that use resonant excitation or filtering of low energy ions for reacceleration to bypass the limitations his paper sets on fusion systems.
Anyways, back to sonofusion. The idea with sonofusion is not, to the best of my understanding, to get a non-equilibrium energy distribution. Rather, it is to get extremely high temperatures in a very small region of space, and then have A) the resultant neutrons seed cavities in the opposite nodes, and B) have energy from the reaction feed back into the wave, helping compress the opposite nodes at the same time that the input accoustic waves normally would. In short, Taleyarkan hopes to achieve a kind of sonofusion chain reaction in which accoustic waves self-maintain a strong degree of anisotropy due to the fusion reactions that they cause. Even if a chain reaction is shown to be impossible, the hope is to at least make a good neutron source.
At least, this is my understanding of what I've read; admittedly, it's been a while.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Well, I am that "other scientist." It is nice to see good press for bubble fusion reach slashdot (no, I didn't submit it.)
First, I agree with the previous posters that this is not "cold fusion." The centers of the collapsing bubbles are very hot. Apparently hot enough to cause fusion.
The research I published was based on experiments conducted at Purdue University using a setup provided by Dr. Taleyarkhan. All equipment calibration, measurements, and data analysis were preformed by me and my students. We had full access to the equipment and we were very careful to make sure that there was nothing to contaminate our data.
People who have read the actual paper (Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, vol 95, p 736) would agree that the results published leave no room for doubt that the neutrons are caused by the collapsing bubbles in a deuterated fluid - the appropriate control experiments were performed - the statistics are significant.
The controversy comes because several well respected and talented physicists have not been able to reproduce Dr. Taleyarkhan's results in their own labs. This has led several people (including an editor from Nature Magazine) to conclude that Dr. Taleyarkhan must be faking his data.
I cannot explain why it has been so hard to reproduce the results in another lab except to say that null results are pretty easy to get in any sensitive experiment and it originally took Dr. Taleyarkhan several years to perfect his methods.
I suspect that all that is needed is a little more time and we will hear about several labs who have confirmed this work completely independently. Of course we are working on that very thing here at LeTourneau University.
Even if it takes some time to reproduce the results at another lab, having independent researchers come to Purdue and reproduce the experiments should be a big step in moving past the controversy.
Respectfully,
Dr. Ted Forringer
Assistant Professor of Physics
LeTourneau University