Slashdot Mirror
Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."
Shouldn't they been using neutron detector to prove that nuclear fusion tuck place?
Apparently the original peer reviewed article in Japanese is here: http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhts/33/3/142/_pdf
Now, i don't understand much about Japanese or high temperature physics but as far as i can see, there isn't even a mention of Helium-4 in the article's English abstract or the picture and graph subtitles. This makes me wonder quite a bit about who put this hyperbolic spin on the story. Maybe the He-4 discovery is just a recent and unexpected find they decided to (too) eagerly emphasize?
Could someone who knows Japanese and some physics post his/her views on the article?
Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.
So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
(The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).
In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).
Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:
"humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
"anser" "goose" should be "hanser"
We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
"Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
There appears to be something happening - but as long as we don't know the mechanism there is nothing to be said about kinetics.
From the article (and some other links in the comments), and assuming fusion really takes place, I would guess that this is some surface-related mechanism. Some unknown mechanism where the D-atoms are first adsorbed on the Pd, and then fusion takes place. If so it can very well be a relative slow process. I have not read the articles in much detail, I'm a chemist, not physicist. The articles also mention that imperfections in the Pd crystals appear to play a major role - again limiting the available area where such a reaction could take place.
And on top of it all, this reaction takes place at much lower temperature than most fusion reactions, thus the movement of the atoms is slower.
All in all, don't let the very slow kinetics put you off the idea that atomic fusion may take place, the most interesting fact reported is that the experiment produces energy over a long period of time and that I think is worth further investigation. First of all of course reproduction of the very experiment by some other scientists, and then improving the efficiency and figuring out what REALLY is going on.
It says that during the experiment they took out the background spectra, so the Deuterium probably wasn't naturally occurring stuff. And the guy who did the experiment seems to have published in quite a few proper journals, so he's probably not a complete quack.
Watch "The war on cold fusion"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5214938694909002743&q=the+war+on+cold+fusion&ei=Exo4SOt6iJzhAsyLxN8D&hl=en
Also watch the US Navy SPAWAR experiments:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2843914499166355574&q=spawar+%22cold+fusion%22&ei=4hk4SNzaMIvS4QLYy53pAw&hl=en
It may not be "cold fusion" but they have proof of excess
heat and other signs of nuclear process.
Some of the scientists involved are well respected too.
Consider all evidence before passing final judgement.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I don't have any problem believing that platinum or palladium could somehow arrange hydrogen atoms in a particular orientation that makes the likelihood of fusion increase. A proton isn't a sphere. It is a trio of quarks, like a Triomino game piece. Maybe if you get the right orientation of the quarks, fusion can take place. To the best of my knowledge we have not done a lot of study on how subatomic particles behave in low energy situations. We just build trillion dollar particle accelerators and smash them together as hard as we can.
Of course, I also don't have any problem believing that platinum or palladium could have absorbed helium like a sponge from somewhere, and the hydrogen is merely driving it out and replacing it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!