nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu (Nanotechnology Newsgroup Nexus) (03/30/89)
A physicist at Los Alamos has posted on sci.physics a refutation of the claim that anyone there had succeeded in duplicating the Fleishman/Pons result: > As a Los Alamos physicist (and as someone who knows our public > affairs officer Jeff Schwartz very well) I can state > that LANL has not duplicated the Pons-Fleischmann experiment > and that anything to the contrary is just not true. (Of course, > that doesn't mean that people aren't trying! ;-)) > > Let's all wait for the scientific papers to come out before we start > "verifying" work we have no real good information on. There's been > an awful lot of politics injected into this story already with feuds > between Utah and BYU. Let's keep Los Alamos out of this for now. > -- > Bill Peter > Los Alamos National Laboratory ------------------------ I have obtained a pre-publication copy of "Observation of Cold Nuclear Fusion in Condensed Matter" by Rafelski, Jones, et al (of Arizona and BYU respectively) courtesy of Scott McCauley. They have quite a soup in their D2O, including 8 metal salts "and a very small amount of AuCN." ..."Titanium and Palladium,..., were found to be effective negative electrodes." They claim that co-deposition of metal and deuterons was important. They go through various gyrations and suggest that the rate is 10e-23 to 10e-20 fusions/deuteron pair/second. They are using a very sensitive neutron detector. The correct name for this kind of fusion is "piezonuclear" fusion. One of the references is an article on cold nuclear fusion in Scientific American, (by themselves, Jones & Rafelski) July 1987. ------------------------ There is a group of guys in the physics lab next door trying to duplicate the results. As I write, they seem to have left the thing running (under a big pile of lead bricks and paraffin slabs) and gone home for the night, possibly in hopes of reproducing Pons' floor-burning phenomenon. I'll let you know what eventuates. --JoSH