COLD FUSION

by Arthur Fisher

After most of the dust from last year's desktop-fusion furor settled, the questions still hanging have less to do with the results of experiments than with the processes of science.

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Unless one had been marooned since the start of 1989 on a desert island without radio or carrier pigeon, the noisy debate over cold fusion would have been inescapable. As the discovery of hightemperature superconductivity had roiled the scientific community a few years before, claims for the achievement of room-temperature nuclear fusion with the generation of large amounts of excess energyclaims made by the chemists B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in Englandrocked the world of physical science. The excitement was not confined to physicists and electrochemists. The cold fusion announcement raised a fever among national leaders, economists, and

the public. If abundant excess energy as much as eight times more than what went incould really be generated with a simple table-top electrolysis apparatus that split heavy waterwhy then, the long-sought ne plus ultra of energy generation was nigh. Hydrogen fusion is intrinsically nonpolluting (helium may be formed as an end product), and one possible fuelthe heavy isotope of hydrogen called deuteriumis cheap and endlessly renewable. Sea water contains enough heavy water (deuterium oxide) in one cubic foot to yield the energy often tons of coal Success in achieving fusion had eluded researchers for some 30 years, even with the use of enormous and complex machinery operating at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. The overall cost of the United States' fusion program had reached billions of dollars. Yet Pons and Fleischmann had done their research with mere thousands of dollars. In their experiments, deuterium released through the electrolysis of heavy water collected on the surface of a palladium electrode. There, the experimenters said, in some yet-to-be-revealed fashion, the deuterium atoms came so close together that they fused and released energy well in excess of the energy supplied to the circuit "Our indications," Pons and Fleischmann wrote, "are that the discovery will be relatively easy to make into a usable technology for generating heat and power...." Were their claims justified? As of this writing, the jury is still out. A considerable majority of scientists doubts that fusion is taking place at all; a much smaller number of researchers believe that certain anomalous effects they are seeing cannot be explained by anything but nuclear fusion. Whatever the final verdict, however, the results announced by Pons and Fleischmann (and the much more modest ones claimed by Steven Jones of Brigham Young University) launched an explosion of research and theorizing, with what many observers see as quite salutary effects. For example, more has been learned about the behavior of metal hydrides (compounds of metal and hydrogen formed during cold fusion experiments)

MOSAIC Volume 21 Number 2 Summer 1990 13

in this one brief span of time than in the past 100 years. Metal hydrides could play a significant energy-storage role in a future hydrogen economy. In nuclear physics, theoreticians have been prodded to think thoughts they had never thought before. One result has been the recomputation of fusion rates between certain nuclear particles. The new data, from the California Institute of Technology, radically revise the old, previously sacrosanct values by as much as ten orders of magnitude. Moreover, the events of 1989 reveal much about the process of science itselfwhat scientists do, and why and how they do it. As John Maddox, editor of the eminent British journal Nature, commented, the original reports from the University of Utah "have done at least one great service for the common cause: they have kindled public curiosity in science to a degree unknown since the Apollo landings on the Moon." To understand both the scientific gains and the public furor, one must go back six decades. Strangely, the tale of cold fusion, a tale offitsand starts, is at least that long.
Hydrogen to helium

The story of cold fusion started in October 1926, when Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters of the Berlin University Institute of Chemistry published a paper titled "Uber die Verwandlung von Wasserstoff in Helium?? ("On the Conversion of Hydrogen to Helium") in the Journal of the German Chemical Society. (At the height of the 1989 fusion furor the paper was translated into English by Paul Allison and Klaus Lockner of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.) The respected German chemists were prompted by speculations that changing hydrogen to helium would involve the conversion of some of the hydrogen's mass into energy, and thus might be the energy source for the stars. They were unaware of the role of neutrons in fusion; the neutron was not discovered until 1932. So they did not know that the most common isotope of helium has two protons and one neutron and thus could not have been made by fusing protons, hydrogen nuclei, alone. Nor could helium 4 have been made, as they thought possible, by fusing four hydrogen atoms. A Fisher, a frequent contributor to Mosaic, last wrote "One Model to Fit Air in Volume 19 Number 3/4 Fall/Winter 1988, the special issue on global change.

quantifiable theory of fusion as the energy source of stars was advanced only in 1933 by physicist Hans Bethe. With hindsight, then, it is clear why early attempts to convert hydrogen to helium had failed. Most of these efforts had relied on adding energy to the hydrogen by means of electrical discharges. But in their 1926 paper, Paneth and Peters proposed a new approach. "Another possibility to get the reaction to become measurable could be that one accelerates the intrinsically unmeasurably slow element conversion reaction catalytically," the chemists wrote.

"The basic idea of our work is therefore to test whether hydrogen, without adding energy, can be transformed . . . into helium if one brings it together with a suitable catalyst We thought from the beginning of Pd [palladium] as a catalyzing substance." (Palladium and other metals such as titanium long have been known for their ability to absorb huge quantities of hydrogen and its isotopes into the crystalline atomic lattice.) Originally Paneth and Peters passed hydrogen gas over a red-hot palladium capillary to transmute hydrogen into helium, but then found they could achieve

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lium for use in lighter-than-air ships. But the hydrogen-to-helium balloon, as it were, had burst Room-temperature nuclear fusion had not, after all, been discovered at that time.
Seeking energy

their goal even at room temperature, especially if they expanded the surface area of the catalyst by using such finely divided preparations as palladium black, palladium sponge, and palladinized asbestos. Sure enough, they found traces of helium. To double-check their method for detecting helium, they used a thorium test standard. (One of the many ironies of this work is that they borrowed the thorium preparation from two colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Dahlem; the two were Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.) Thus Paneth and Peters believed they had demonstrated cold nuclear fusion well before the demonstration of nuclear fission. Reports of Paneth and Peters's seeming success were greeted warmly. An article in Nature stated: 'This announcement, if correct, is of great importance and will

evoke even more interest than the claim by Miethe and Stammreich to have transmuted mercury to gold." Eight months after their original experiments, however, Paneth and Peters retracted their revolutionary findings. In subsequent research, carried out at Cornell University and in Berlin, they learned that they had slighted a significant source of error. In checking whether helium could have diffused from room air through the glass walls of their apparatus, they found that glass heated in a hydrogen atmosphere gave up absorbed helium. Further, they found that the palladinized asbestos, which had actually given them their best results, also released significant quantities of helium in the presence of hydrogen. The two German chemists' principal goal had not been to uncover a new energy source; they wanted to create he-

The cold fusion story, however, was just warming up. In 1925, John Tandberg of the Electrolux Research Laboratory in Stockholm was seeking a metal capable of sealing hydrogen gas in refrigerators and became aware of palladium's unusual attributes. Intrigued by the first report of the Paneth and Peters success, he decided to concentrate hydrogen at the palladium surface by building an electrolytic cell to split ordinary water, with palladium as one of the electrodes. In Tandberg's application to the Swedish patent office, he dubbed the process "A method for the release of atomic energy," but perhaps in the belief he might be thought to be overreaching, he later changed the title to "A method to produce helium and useful energy." Although the patent was eventually denied, Tandberg persevered in collaboration with Torsten Wilner. Wilner's son, Bertil, is now in the Department of Plasma Physics and Fusion Research of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He recalls, from his father's notes, that after the discovery of deuterium in 1932, Tandberg and Torsten Wilner repeated the electrolysis experiment using a palladium electrode, but this time with heavy waterdeuterium oxideprobably supplied by Niels Bohr. In the 1940s, they bombarded a deuterium-saturated palladium sheet with deuterons (deuterium ions). The result they recordedthe generation of helium 3 and neutronsrepresents one branch of the now well known deuteron-plus-deuteron fusion reaction. Helium 3, a light isotope of helium, has a nucleus containing two protons and one neutron. A second branch, which is about equally likely to occur, yields a proton and a tritonthe nucleus of a tritium atom. A very rare third branch, about one in ten million, of the deuteronplus-deuteron fusion reaction leads to a helium 4 nucleus and a great deal of energy in the form of gamma rays. In each reaction, energy results from the conversion of a minute amount of mass; the combined masses of the fusion products are less than the combined original masses of the fusion particles. (A deuteron consists of one proton and one

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neutron; a triton consists of one proton and two neutrons. A hydrogen nucleus consists of a single proton; thus deuterium and tritium are heavier isotopes of hydrogen. Tritium is radioactive, with a half-life of 12.26 years.) The fusion of two deuterons can occur only when the particles are brought close enough togethergenerally about 10"13 centimeterso that the powerful but short-range strong nuclear force can take effect And there's the rub: The deuterons are both positively charged and are therefore repelled by the electromagnetic force, which has an infinite range. As the particles approach one another, the repulsion reaches a maximum called the Coulomb barrier, a barrier that must be somehow overcome for fusion to occur. If the particles can be brought close enough together, a quantummechanical effect called tunneling occurs and the deuterons fuse. How to get the particles close enough? Ever since the development of the hydrogen bomb about 40 years ago, physicists have relentlessly pursued the goal of controlled nuclear fusion, most frequently via very high temperatures. If the particles are endowed with tremendous kinetic energy, say hot-fusion researchers, they may penetrate the Coulomb barrier. For the reaction to be self-sustaining, the collection of particles must be crowded enough and confined long enough, a set of conditions called the Lawson criteria. In the superhot, superdense core of the sun, fusion reactions occur at a temperature of ten million degrees, and the particles are confined by the star's enormous gravitational field. On earth, temperatures of 100 million degrees are required for deuterium-tritium fusion (currently viewed as the most favorable reaction to pursue). Two principal methods of achieving such temperatures and then of confining the resulting high-energy particles have been followed, with variable success, over the last four decades. One is to create a hot plasma and then trap it in some sort of magnetic bottlea problem akin, the saying goes, to confining Jello with rubber bands. The other is to hit pellets of nuclear fuel with laser beams so intense that fusion occurs before the pellets' contents have time to dissipatea technique called inertial confinement Both methods have been plagued with difficulties, and neither, after the expen-

diture of billions of dollars, appears close tofruition.The caustic quip in the hot-fusion community is that a practical fusion reactor is at least 25 years away, and has been so for the last 40 years. Moon-catalyzed fusion There is, however, another means of inducing nuclear fusion, and it does not rely on high temperature. That is to shield the approaching nuclei from the electromagnetic repulsive force by introducing a particle of opposite charge. For various reasons, negatively charged electrons cannot provide enough effective shielding. But another particle can. That is the negative muon, a short-lived subnuclear particle found naturally in secondary cosmic rays, which shower down on the earth when primary cosmic rays collide with constituents at the top of the upper atmosphere. In 1947 F. C. Frank of the University of Bristol in England first theorized that the muon, produced on the earth in an accelerator and discovered just ten years before, could play the part of catalyst to induce fusion in the isotopes of hydrogen, even at room temperature. Frank speculated that the muon would emerge from each fusion unchanged and thus would be available to go on facilitating the reactions. These ideas were pursued shortly afterward by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet physicists. Hie theory was inadvertently verified in 1956 by Luis Alvarez of the University of California at Berkeley, a great experimentalist and a pioneer of bubble-chamber research. While poring over the films of an unrelated bubble-chamber experiment, he noticed some strange particle tracks: muons had stopped inside a chamberfilledwith liquid hydrogen and deuterium. Alvarez and his colleagues were unaware of the Frank-Sakharov hypothesis. But with the aid of Edward Teller they were able to conclude that they were seeing muon-catalyzed fusion. The Alvarez-Teller group reasoned that the muon had formed a molecule incorporating the fusion particles, supplanting the role of an orbiting electron. Because the muon's mass is 207 times that of the electron, its orbit is much tighter than an electron's and it binds the particles together some 200 times as close as when they are bound in an ordinary heavy hydrogen molecule. This muonic confinement results in fusion in about a trillionth of a second.

The excitement induced by this discovery was tremendous, just as it has been at every twist and turn of the cold fusion road. When he rose to accept the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics (for his bubble-chamber experiments), Alvarez said of the fusion finding, "We had a short but exhilarating experience when we thought we had solved all the fuel problems of mankind for the rest of time." The exhilaration faded, however, when calculations revealed that the muon has a lifetime so short that any given one could catalyze no more than one or two fusions. It takes a good deal of energy (and money) to generate muons in an accelerator, so just to break even would require at least a rate of 300 to 400 fusions per muon. An intuitive leap With this discouraging development muon-catalyzed cold fusion lay virtually dormant for almost 20 years, with sporadic theoretical work along the way Then in 1977, Soviet researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna predicted that a phenomenon called resonance would occur in a mixture of deuterium and tritium under certain circumstances, and that it would permit more than 100 fusions per muon. Reports of this work so tantalized physicist Steven E. Jones (then at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho Falls and now at Brigham Young University), that he decided to test the predictions. In a series of experiments beginning in 1982, he and his group, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, used the muon beam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to achieve cold fusion. Some of his results over the next half-dozen years have been promising, but the number of fusions each muon can catalyze is still too low. Today, Jones is reluctant to envisage a practical future for the process. "I believe," he says, "that it is very unlikely muon-catalyzed fusion will ever become a commercial source of energy." Other routes If muons were capable of inducing cold fusion, it was natural for Jones and others to speculate on what otherperhaps more fruitfulroutes might achieve the same goal When Jones discussed his work at a BYU faculty colloquium in March 1986, a physicist there named Paul Palmer made the kind of intuitive leap that often characterizes

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bold new scientific theories. It was well known that abnormally high concentrations of helium 3a light and, relative to helium 4, rare isotope of heliumis found in the rocks, liquids, and gases belched from volcanoes, and also in the atmosphere over areas where the earth's great tectonic plates are separating or gnashing together. Other research has found anomalous ratios of helium isotopes in diamonds. Helium 3 is a product of deuteriumdeuterium fusion and also of hydrogendeuterium fusion. Perhaps, Palmer suggested, some form of cold fusion was operating within the earth, where rocks under pressure could catalyze the process, thus accounting for both the anomalous helium 3 and the great energy associated with tectonic activity. Further, perhaps that process could be duplicated in the laboratory. Jones now believes that this geological cold-fusion hypothesis is sustainable. Deuterium was incorporated into the earth during its birth, and its current abundance in sea water is in a ratio of about 1.5 x 10~4 deuterons per proton. This water is subducted deep into the earth's crust at converging tectonic plate margins, reaching as far down as the Mohorovicic Discontinuitythe top of the earth's mantlebefore being sucked up into the ocean again. Jones calculates that a torrent of water equal to the entire mass of the oceans circulates through the mantle in about one billion years, more than enough deuterium, Jones calculates, to account for the high temperature of the core and the heat emitted to the surface. 'While the earth's heat must certainly derive from several sources," he states, "cold geological nuclear fusion could account for steady-state production of considerable heat and helium 3 in the earth's interior." One piece of substantiation for this theory, Jones says, would be to find tritium in volcanic emissions. Tritium is a product of deuterium-deuterium fusion about 50 percent of the time, and tritium decays to helium 3 with a half-life of 12.4 years. So finding tritium in the gases belched by a volcano, Jones says, "would corroborate our hypothesis of geological cold fusion in recent times." . Just such evidence was found, Jones believes, in 1972 by a tritium-monitoring station operated from August 1971 to the end of 1977 by the University of Florida at Miami, atop Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii. "We have found strong cor-

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relations between tritium detected at Mauna Loa and nearby volcanic activity in this period of time," Jones reports. An especially striking spike in the tritium level appears in data from FebruaryMarch 1972. It is coincident, Jones notes, with a major eruption of the Mauna Ulu volcano about 40 kilometers to the southeast. The winds at the time would have carried volcanic gases straight for the Mauna Loa station. These speculations have been extended by Jones and his colleagues to Jupiter, a planet that radiates about twice as much heat as it gamers from the sun and must therefore have some kind of internal heat source. "It is interesting to consider whether cold nuclear fusion in the core of Jupiter, which is probably metallic hydrogen plus iron silicate, could account for its large heat production," Jones states. "If the cold fusion hypothesis holds, we predict Jupiter to have a large helium 3/helium 4 ratio and a small [deuterium/hydrogen] d/p ratio [relative to other planets]. There may even be detectable tritium on the planet. Interestingly, the Galileo space probe is already designed to measure these quantities in 1991." (Now that it is known from the spectacular Voyager 2 flyby in August 1989 that Neptune also radiates much more energy than it receives, some of the same notions may apply.) Simulation Whatever the fate of the geophysical cold fusion hypothesis, its formulation spurred Jones and his collaborators to try to simulate the alleged effect in the laboratory, beginning in May 1986. The approach was essentially similar to that tried by Paneth and Peters 60 years before: to cram large quantities of a gas into a metal electrolytic means. But this time the gas was deuterium, not hydrogen. Perhaps the deuterons would be squeezed so tightly together in the metal lattice that they would fuse even at room temperaturea phenomenon Jones and a colleague, C. DeWitt Van Siclen, called piezonuclear fusion. Jones selected palladium and titanium as candidate cathodes because of their long-established reputation for holding hydrogen and forming hydrides. Gold foil was used for the positive electrodes. The electrolyte was deuterium o x i d e heavy water^with a dose of metallic salts, including those of lithium and sodium, which are found in volcanic magma. This preparationJones calls it

variously a "witches' brew" or "motherearth soup"owed its original formulation in part to the geochemical considerations that had launched the effort. Its exact composition evolved as the experiments continued. (Jones applied for funding in May 1986 from the U.S. Department of Energy, and was awarded it. His work is still supported by the Advanced Energy Projects Division of DOE. He also has some support from EPRI, the California based Electric Power Research Institute.) The BYU researchers became convinced by the end of 1988 that they were indeed seeing nuclear fusion in their electrolytic cells, which were operated at room temperature and with a low voltage. The evidence consisted of neutrons with the right energy signature: 2.5 MeV. But the fusion rate observed was extremely lownot high enough by many orders of magnitude to qualify as a practical energy source. "Cold fusion is not a short cut to fusion energy," Jones has said. "But I have no doubt that we are seeing a very small but highly significant scientific effect" In the meantime, research at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City was proceeding along similar lines but with quite different consequences. Pons and Fleischmann Stanley Pons, the chairman of the university's chemistry department, had studied for his doctorate at the University of Southampton in England, in part under Martin Fleischmann's tutelage. Fleischmann is a past president of the International Society of Electrochemis try and a fellow of Britain's Royal Society. He is also expert on palladium, its isotopes, and its remarkable thirst for hydrogen. (In one of those pregnant coincidences that pepper scientific research, both Fleischmann and Fritz Paneth had been in the same chemistry department at the University of Durham in England during the 1950s.) Friends since the late 1970s, Pons and Fleischmann began a real collaboration in 1984. Their quest was the 60-year-old goal of achieving low-temperature fusion in palladium. That collaboration culminated in March 1989 with the announcement that the team had achieved sustained nuclear fusion at room temperature in a glass bottle suspended in a Rubbermaid dishpan. The equipment consisted of a simple electrolytic cell with a palladium

electrode suspended in heavy water and a car battery to provide electricity. They jokingly called the apparatusfamiliar to any high school chemistry student who has split water with a current"the Utah U-l Tokamak." Most important, they said the process yielded surplus energy in the form of neutrons and especially as excess heat as much as eight times as much energy coming out as they were putting in. That would far exceed the energy break-even point that had eluded fusion researchers for decades. If verified, the results would mean that society could leapfrog such difficult, complex, and still unproved sources of fusion energy as magnetic bottles and laser confinement And that would be, it has been said, "the most important discovery since fire." Pons and Pleischmann's results were strikingly different from the experimental results announced by Steven Jones and the BYU group. In fact, the energy release claimed by Pons and Fleischmann is a billion to a trillion times as great. As Jones says, it is the difference between a dollar bill and the national debt So remarkable were the University of Utah results, in fact, that they triggered a paroxysm of research efforts involving thousands of scientists at hundreds of facilities and costing probably more than a billion dollars. The efforts to replicate the PonsFleischmann results have been preponderantly unsuccessful. Suffice it to say that early enthusiasm has waned and early skepticism has waxed. In April 1989 a special 22-member panel of scientists was convened by the U.S. Department of Energy to assess the cold fusion claims. In July the panel concluded in a preliminary report that "the experiments reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion." There would therefore be no current justification for "special programs to establish cold fusion research centers or to support new efforts to find cold fusion." The University of Utah had earlier appealed to Congress to appropriate $25 million to help open just such a center under its aegis. The DOE report did, however, suggest that the low-level cold fusion results of fered by BYU might be of scientific interest And it said that enough puzzles about cold fusion remained to merit the expenditure of continued modest funding of

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experiments. The panel was chaired by John R Huizenga, a nuclear chemist at the University of Rochester, and by Norman F. Ramsey, a physicist at Harvard University (whose Nobel Prize in Physics came later in 1989). A much different conclusion, however, was reached by the state of Utah. Its legislature voted the expenditure of $5 million to establish the National Cold Fusion Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, with the provision that a nine-member advisory panel must agree that the Pons-Fleischmann work had received "scientific confirmation." In August 1989, the panel voted seven to one to release $4.5 million, with one abstention. (The no vote was cast by Karen Morse, a chemist who is provost at Utah State University. Utah State phys-

MOSAIC Volume 21 Number 2 Summer 1990 19

icist Wilford Hansen abstained.) And to keep its options open, General Electric signed a memorandum of cooperation with the University of Utah, pledging that its own scientists would work on the project "only so long as reasonable progress is being made toward what is happening in the electrochemical cells." In October 1989 about 50 scientists attended a two-and-one-half-day cold fusion workshop in Washington, D.C., convened by the National Science Foundation and EPRI. The meeting was co-

chaired by John Appleby of Texas A&M University, an active participant in cold fusion research, and Paul C. W. Chu of the University of Houston, known primarily for his discovery of a new class of high-temperature superconductors. (See the special report on high-temperature superconductivity by Edward Edelsoe in Mosaic Volume 19 Number 1 Spring 1988.) The assembled scientists reported on a variety of anomalous effects from cold fusion experiments. "New, positive results in excess heat productions and nuclear product generation [such as tritium] have been presented...." the co-chairmen reported at the end of the meeting. "Based on the information that we have, these effects cannot be explained as artifacts, equipment error, or human errors. However, the predictability and reproducibility of the occurrence of these effects and possible correlation among the various effects, which are common for the established scientific facts, are still lacking. Given the potential significance of the problem, further research is definitely desirable to improve the reproducibility of the effects and to unravel the mystery of the observations. It is the "lack of correlation"that is, the failure to observe excess heat at the same time as any other sign of fusion, such as tritium, gamma rays, or neutronsthat has provoked much of the skepticism about the legitimacy of the University of Utah claims. As of this writing, though reports of one sort or another continue to issue, no laboratory has reported observing any two of these signatures simultaneously. It is to seek such confirmation that the National Cold Fusion Institute's initial plans call for spending $4.5 million over two years of further experimentation. Then the Utah group hopes for infusions of corporate and/or federal money to continue beyond that, with a goal of a $10million annual budget afterfiveyears.

That hope may have dimmed with the November 1989 release of the final report of the U.S. Department of Energy's Huizenga-Ramsey Committee (dubbed "the Killer Committee" by one PonsFleischmann supporter). Differing little from the earlier report, it restated that there was no evidence that cold fusion could ever become a useful energy source; therefore no special federal funding for cold fusion research was called for. The panel concluded that there was no evidence that the excess heat reported by some researchers was due to fusion. 'The questions raised by cold fusion experiments," said Huizenga, "raise some questions of scientific interest, but they certainly don't warrant any kind of large research effort." The DOE'S final report itself stated: 'There remain unresolved issues which may have interesting implications. The panel is therefore sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system." Another kind of cell Against this background, Steven Jones and his collaborators (as well as other groups) continue to try to confirm Jones's much more modest findings. They have found that electrochemical cells are not essential to witness a purported cold fusion effect In April 1989, a team of scientists at the Italian National Agency for Nuclear and Alternative Energy at Frascati, led by Francesco Scaramuzzi, announced they had achieved cold fusionas evidenced by the emission of neutronsin a much simpler way. isWe wondered," their report stated, "whether the use of an electrolytic cell was a necessary condition in order to obtain fusion results. Consequently, we decided to put deuterium gas in direct contact with a material, and following consideration of the various metals that absorb hydrogen, we chose titanium. In order to create a situation of non-equilibrium, we decided to change the thermodynamic parameters of the system, in particular temperature and pressure; in this way," they said, "we could create a dynamic condition for the process of absorption/desorption of deuterium in titanium." The result was a measurable emission of neutrons, consistent with the fusion rates that Jones had been reporting. The greatest flux of neutrons came when the pressurized cell wasfirstcooled to liquid

nitrogen temperature and then allowed to warm up. Similar results have been achieved in a collaboration between Jones and investigators led by Antonio Bertin at the Gran Sasso laboratory of Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Fusion. Experiments there are conducted deep within an Alpine mountain to shield them from cosmic rays. Although Jones is convinced that such results are evidence of nuclear fusion, other observers maintain that these experiments are not sensitive enough to tell whether the very low neutron fluxes are part of the natural background or actual fusion neutrons. Low levels of neutrons are deucedly difficult to separate from what physicists call backgroundambient neutrons that have no source in the experiment at hand. One prolific background source is cosmic rays, which bombard the earth from space. When they interact with matter, they can produce neutron emissions that vary with time and even with changing barometric pressure, because the density of the atmosphere affects the cosmic ray flux. Jones's current research, though not entirely abandoning the electrolyte of mother-earth soup, focuses ,on a far simpler non-electrolytic apparatus called a pressure cell 'We are concentrating on the deuterium pressure-loading technique," he says, "not only because it is much simpler to use, but because the neutron bursts that are the most compelling evidence we have of cold fusion are much more reproducible with it than with the electrolytic cells." Jones's experiments are conducted in avast subterranean laboratory shared by other physics researchers at the Brigham Young University campus in Provo. The pressurized-deuterium apparatus, with its bottle, 60 centimeters of tubing, and round pressure gauge, looks like one of the dottier musical instruments imagined by Dr. Seuss. The stainlesssteel bottle, about 23 centimeters by 4 centimeters, is rated at 1800 psi. "We purchase the deuterium commercially," Jones says. The gas is under pressure and comes in a standard vessel at about 1700 psi. Instead of palladium, he uses a titanium alloy, which is chopped into small pieces in a commercial kitchen blender. ('The titanium alloy is awfully tough on the blades," Jones says.) Then the bottle isfilledwith deuterium under a pressure of about 1000 pounds per square inch, or 70 atmospheres.

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Jones has used this pressure cell in collaborations at Gran Sasso in Italy, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at Yale University, and at Brookhaven National laboratory, although he actually began using a pressure cell atBYU in 1986. "Now we are getting about 80 percent reproducibility with the pressure cells, against about 50 percent with the electrolytic cells,1' he says. Because the pressure cells avoid all the complications of electrolytic reactions, it is much easier to control the parameters involvedessentially pressure, temperature, and time. That makes it easier to find out which parameters to manipulate to approach 100 percent reproducibility of the cold fusion effect Frankly, Jones says, he has no idea which parameters he needs to control. He knows that varying the temperature helps, but not why it does. "We also get different rates of neutrons in the pressurized bottles when they are just sitting at room temperature, differences that are statistically significant. And we are unable to control it," says Jones. "So it's very puzzling and I don't blame people for being skeptical. I wasn't convinced myself after our ran, even after the work at Gran Sasso. It wasn't until I worked with Howard Menlove and his colleagues at Los Alamos and was able to use their counter that I became really convinced." Still, the absence of 100-percent reproducibility, and the variability of the resuits for unknown reasons, remain puzzlingand troublingto Jones.
Something quite special

Jones found that neutron bursts seen in the Los Alamos collaborationbursts of 100 to 200 neutronswere much more reproducible with the pressure cell. "And they are the most compelling evidence yet that we are seeing cold fusion," he says. "It's a very curious phenomenon; I don't know anything else in nature where you get a burst of neutrons of that magnitude in such a short time: 50 microseconds or less." The Los Alamos results were first reported in May 1989 at a three-day meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, convened by the U.S. Department of Energy under the sponsorship of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Nobel laureate J. Robert Schrieffer, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a co-chairman of the meeting. (The

other co-chairman was Siegfried S. Hecker, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory.) Schrieffer agreed that this evidence, the first support from a national laboratory, was persuasive. "I believe there is a reasonable chance that what is seen at this low [neutron] level is from fusion or some other nuclear process," Schrieffer said. "Something quite special is apparently going on." The trouble is that, besides the possible introduction of background neutrons, the very materials chosen to shield the detector and even components of the detector itself can also unleash a cascade of neutrons, leading to a fatal descent into error for the unwary experimenter. The basic problem with detecting neutrons is that they carry no charge; they are electrically neutral. Therefore they cannot be traced by the way their path is affected in a magnetic or electric field. "That makes it very hard," says Moshe Gai, a physicist at Yale University who works with one of the most sensitive neutron detectors in the world. Gai joined Jones in the summer of 1989 to run the pressurized-cell experiment with the Yale instrument, in order, Jones says, "to resolve this thing somehow." The Yale instrument is of a type that directly measures the full energy of the neutroncharacteristically a very energetic 2.5 MeV for nuclear-fusion neutrons. It uses a technique called timeof-flight measurement, recording the time it takes for a neutron to be registered first on one detector and then on a second one a precisely measured distance away. "Gamma rays travel at the speed of light," explains Gai, "so their travel time is effectively defined as zero. But neutrons are much slower: about three percent of the speed of lightw This and other characteristics make it possible for the experimenters to weed out the energetic gamma ray signals. Moreover, the neutrons are measured from three different angles. "If it is really a neutron from the experiment," says Gai, "it will look like one three different times. If it is background, there is only a very small chance of its measuring up from all three angles." The Yale instrument is housed in a laboratory tunneled out of a New Haven, Connecticut hillside. It consists of a ring of detectors in the shape of truncated hexagons, each filled with a fluid called NE213. (The NE stands for the fluid's manufacturer, Nuclear Enterprises.) The

fluid is a mixture of hydrocarbons that includes benzene, with added xylene and naphthalene. "If you smell mothballs around the detector," Gai says, "yon know you have a leak. [The fluid] is terrible stuff to work with. The xylene is very toxic. The fluid expands a lot, so we have to build in reservoirs to handle that. And it has a very low flash point; it can catch fire very easily. But it's the best medium for neutron detection." What makes it so is NE2i3's molecular structure. It will greet the arrival of either a neutron or a gamma ray with a flash of lightscintillationwhich is detected by photomultiplier tubes. But the experimenter gets a further check, apart from the time-of-flight measurements, on whether he or she has gotten a gamma ray or a neutron. The gamma ray liberates an electron; the neutron liberates a proton. And these two particles result in different kinds of scintillation because they excite atoms to different states. 'That's what NE213 is good for," says Gai Hie Yale experimenters go to elaborate lengths to minimize interference from stray background effects. Gai believes the background is the lowest in the country, about one-hundredth of the level in most other experiments and about afifthof that in the BYU experiment The detectors are shielded by walls of what look like painted wooden building blocks, each two feet long and eighteen inches wide,filledwith melted paraffin to which borax has been added. Borax is used because boron has a very large cross section for neutron capture. Jones's own neutron spectrometer, or detector, is not capable of distinguishing bursts from random neutron emissions. Instead, it moderates neutrons so that they lose most of their energy after many, many collisions. Shielded from gamma rays by piles of boxes of pennies ($25 pennies, the legend on each carton proclaims), the detector has three panes of lithium-doped glass suspended in the liquid scintillator NE213. Entry of a neutron yields two pulses, about 30 microseconds apart. The first pulse arises in the liquid scintillator. The second pulse comes when the moderated neutron interacts with lithium 6, which has a tremendous cross section for slow neutron capture. The result of the interaction is an alpha particle and a tritium particle, both of which produce characteristic scintillation. The differences in the pulse's shape and amplitude from each kind of scintillators provide energy infer-

22 MOSAIC Volume 21 Number 2 Summer 1990

mation and allow the identification of fusion neutrons. Results of the Yale-BrookhavenBrigham Young effort have been inconclusive. In November 1989, the investigators reported "no statistically significant deviations from the background were observed for events where five or more neutrons are detected over a ten-day experiment" Experiments such as these may eventually resolve the question of whether fusion neutrons are indeed being generated in the pressurized and/or electrolytic cells being ran all over the world. But they cannot, of course, explain the how and why of what is happening. That is the eternal burden of the theorists, and they have been very busy. One of the major sticking points of the Pons-Pleischmann experiments has been that the rate of excess heat they seeenough in one experiment to vaporize the cell and cause considerable damage to the surroundingsis totally inconsistent with the very small lux of fusion neutrons reported. In fact, the heat is a billion times too large. A theoretical escape from this dilemma was offered by two University of Utah chemistry professors, ChevesT. Walling and Jack Simons, who proposed the following: When two deuterons fuse, they normally form a very short-lived excited helium 4 nucleus with an energy of 24 MeV. It is this nucleus that almost instantly breaks down into either of the two main deuterium-deuterium fusion branches: a helium 3 and a neutron, or a tritium and a proton. But Walling and Simons suggested that when the helium 4 nucleus is forged inside the palladium lattice, it transfers most of its energy instead to the electron-rich environment, so the result is stable helium 4 and large amounts of heat. It would obviously be a comfort for this theory if helium 4 were indeed found in the palladium electrodes of the University of Utah experiments. To date, careful analyses in a variety of laboratories have failed to reveal its presence. There has also been a spate of theories explaining why the excess heat (if there is indeed any, rather than being the result of measurement error) may have origins other than fusion. Nobel laureate and chemist Linus Pauling suggests that the palladium lattice, when absorbing large amounts of deuterium, becomes unstable and disintegrates. The bonds that had formed between deuterium and

palladium break, and heat is released. Many chemists suggest that heat could be generated by the recombination of deuterium and hydrogen after they had been dissociated from heavy water in the electrolytic cells. Among them is chemist Gilbert P. Pollnow, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, who says that the idea of palladium-catalyzed thermal combusr tion of the deuterium and oxygen agrees with his own research in the development of hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells. George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, notes that in 1823 the German chemist Johan Dobereiner observed palladium spontaneously catalyze the oxidation of hydrogen, and invented a lighter called the Peuerzeug based on that phenomenon. It is possible, he wryly suggests, that Pons and Pleischmann have actually reinvented the cigarette lighter. Chapline and his colleagues also suggested that the source of the small neutron flux seen in these experiments was the result of cosmic ray muons becoming implanted in the palladium electrode. There they would have induced muon-catalyzed cold fusioninteresting but not new. Quasi-particles Jones, who certainly knows as much about muon-catalyzed fusion as anyone else, is quite positive that no such effect can be contaminating his own experiments. Jones and one of his colleagues, theoretical physicist Johan Rafelski at the University of Arizona, propose that what they call the piezonuclear fusion effect could be caused by the existence of quasi-particles; specifically, quasielectrons. These particles would behave as if they were heavier than ordinary electrons and therefore exert the same kind of squeeze as the much heavier muon does in muon-catalyzed fusion. Jones and Rafelski calculate that the quasi-particles would need to be a few times as massive as an electron to yield the neutron flux consistent with what they observeabout 10"23 fusions per deuteron pair per second. Such quasielectrons could form in the palladium or titanium lattice through the effects of the electronic field on a sea of electrons. Speculation about fusion rates resulted in at least one positive result: a correction of previously accepted values. Steven E. Koonin, a professor of theoret-

ical physics at the California Institute of Technology, together with Michael Nauenberg of the University of California at Santa Cruz, recalculated the fusion rates of various isotopes of hydrogen. There were several surprises in store. First, the previous best estimate of the inherent rate of deuterium-deuterium fusion, 10"74 events per second, has been replaced by one more than ten billion times faster: 3 x 10~64 events per second. The biggest surprise, says Koonin, is that the intrinsic rate of hydrogendeuterium fusion is 10~55 events per second, almost 100 million times faster than deuterium-deuterium fusion. That is probably because the lighter hydrogen nucleus can more easily tunnel through the Coulomb barrier. "We were also able to compute how much one would have to enhance the electron mass to account for the cold fusion results reported by Brigham Young University and the University of Utah," says Koonin. They are, respectively,fivetimes and ten times. "Our theoretical studies indicate that the BYU results are quite improbable but perhaps not impossible. However, we know of no way of accounting for the University of Utah results." Probable or not, accountable or not, cold fusion and the scientific efforts it has spawned are assured a niche in history. Hie National Science Foundation has agreed to fund a cold fusion archive at Cornell University, to be part of Cornell's program on science, technology, and society. Physicists, chemistsany researchers who either joined in or were merely bemused spectators of the cold fusion spectacularare invited to send relevant materials to the archive. Solicited are such things as seminar and laboratory notes or projection slides and overhead transparencies prepared for formal or informal presentations. "Since this is a wonderful example of how scientists attacked a new and controversial issue," says Brace V. Lewenstein, a science historian and the archive's director, "we want to be sure that much of the ephemeral material ereated in the process gets saved. We hope," he declares, "that the archive will be a resource for historians and sociologists of science in the future." The archive documenting the coldfusion events is being assembled at Cornell University with supportfromthe National Science Foundation's Sociology Program.

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