My wake-up call regarding regarding cold fusion came from Ron Maimon’s writings at Physics Stack Exchange, e.g. here and here. It was especially startling to learn that there were prior observations, going back decades, of anomalies associated with deuterated palladium.
As for the physics of it, the two main problems seem to be (1) where does the energy to overcome Coulomb repulsion come from (2) why aren’t lots of neutrons being produced. In the first link above, Maimon speculates (1) that the energy comes from a chain reaction in which inner-orbital electrons which individually have O(10 keV) energy are coherently excited (2) that deuteron-deuteron fusion occurs in close proximity to the palladium nucleus and this does something odd to the intermediate states.
My wake-up call regarding regarding cold fusion came from Ron Maimon’s writings at Physics Stack Exchange, e.g. here and here. It was especially startling to learn that there were prior observations, going back decades, of anomalies associated with deuterated palladium.
As for the physics of it, the two main problems seem to be (1) where does the energy to overcome Coulomb repulsion come from (2) why aren’t lots of neutrons being produced. In the first link above, Maimon speculates (1) that the energy comes from a chain reaction in which inner-orbital electrons which individually have O(10 keV) energy are coherently excited (2) that deuteron-deuteron fusion occurs in close proximity to the palladium nucleus and this does something odd to the intermediate states.
Huh. Those links are … really damn persuasive. They’re actually so right I’m worried he’s just a master of the Dark Arts.
Hmm.