... and cold fusion

22. Lightning melts Metals; and I hinted in my Paper on that Subject, that I suspected it to be a cold Fusion (I do not mean a Fusion by Force of Cold, but a Fusion without Heat.)

-- Benjamin Franklin, second letter to Peter Collison dated July 29, 1750

[This is the third post in a series; the first is here.]

The man who coined the phrase "cold fusion" was none other than Benjamin Franklin, in connection with his experiments on electricity and lightning. The phrase is generally taken to mean that Franklin found static electricity capable of inducing changes in metal much like melting, but without producing the sensible heat that would normally have accompanied the process. As the foremost student of lightning of his day, there is a reasonable possibility he saw ball lightning or other plasmoid phenomena. We know that German physicist Georg Wilhelm Reichmann, attempting to replicate Franklin's famous kite experiment the following year, did. Briefly. "A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead and killed him instantly - providing history with the first documented example of ball lightning in the process." (APS)

Observed ball lightnings tend to range from fist to furniture sized. This is probably more an observer selection effect than a physical one. We know that latter-day experiments by Bostick, Shoulders, Matsumoto, Adamenko, Jaitner, and others have produced condensed plasmoids with sizes (and characteristic tracks) range down to the 50 micron range, requiring microscopes to see their structure. 

Cold fusion, in Franklin's sense, definitely appears to be going on when a plasmoid touches down on to matter, be it metal or dielectric. Condensed plasmoids (hereinafter CPs) disrupt matter very much as super-highly charged ions do, by yanking electrons off atoms, removing bonds and causing the atoms to repel each other electrostatically. 

Here are two photos from Ken Shoulders' work showing holes made in lead glass and aluminum respectively by CPs.  

In these pictures, CPs have drilled through an aluminum coating and into a slab of alumina (Al2O3, a very hard ceramic and the primary constituent of ruby and sapphire), spewing alumina back out the holes in such a way as to form a patchy coating on the aluminum.

It's pretty clear that ionic disruption, not heat, is the causative agent here, so we have cold fusion in Franklin's sense. What about the more modern sense of nuclear reactions? Here is a micrograph of a similar hole in a deuterium-loaded palladium foil. Although most of the foil remained pure palladium, the gunk around the hole(s) evidenced significant amounts of silicon, calcium, and magnesium.

So what's going on? The theory is that CPs form when a spark, ranging from rubbing a cat and touching a doorknob to lightning, finds just the right conditions for a runaway ζ-pinch which magnetically squeezes the plasma to atomic scales. Considered in isolation, a current like that hanging in free space really wants to form a loop, since it's creating a major positive charge at one end and a negative one at the other, and the ends thus attract. When the ζ-pinch runs away it's capable of squeezing nuclei together close enough for tunneling to happen, and what happens then depends on what nuclei happen to have gotten trapped in there.

What happens then is problematical if only because there are so many possibilities depending on both the environment and the configuration of the CP. But it seems that in come cases, especially in metal, the CP can dig itself a "nest" which both stabilizes it and provides it with fusion fuel (e.g. deuterons with which a palladium electrode has been loaded, that seep out into the CP sustaining an ongoing reaction). Evidence for this is that electrodes that have exhibited cold fusion tend to be easier to start it up again than fresh ones, presumeably because the "nests" are already there and easier to form CPs in.

Condensed plasmoids

 The second post in a series; the first is here. 

So a plasmoid is a (more-or-less) stable configuration of plasma, currents, and magnetic fields; the most well-know example is ball lightning. Plasmoids require energy to form, and typically emit energy, by glowing or ionizing matter around them; when the remaining energy is too small to maintain the conditions of the stable cofiguration, the plasmoid typically explodes, releasing all the rest of its energy at once.

Giant multi-billion experimental fusion reactors use extremely high-temperature plasmas in configurations as much like plasmoids as possible, but they are not technically plasmoids, because they do not self-sustain and require the input of substantial energy (and externally supplied magnetic fields) to operate. There are currently about 45 companies trying to build fusion reactors, up from 10 a decade ago. Fusion in plasmas has been achieved many times: the trick everyone is trying for is to get more energy out than you put in.

A condensed plasmoid, on the other hand, is something closer to the size of your hand than the Eiffel Tower. Indeed the ones that we think we have seen generating more energy than they lose are microscopic or not much bigger. Sometimes, if this interpretation is correct, they remain stable for days, generating substantial energy with no external energy input. How can this be if it is so difficult to get a big tokamak to do the same thing?

We believe that the key is that the condensed plasmoids are cold. Heat (and the big reactors are intentionally trying for millions of degrees) increases pressure, and thus fights against the squeeze of the ζ-pinch effect. If a plasmoid is microscopic, it will lose heat fast through radiation. Of course normally it would then simply revert to normal matter, like a spark in a bug-zapper. But if the right combination of (very high) current, (fairly low) pressure, chemistry, and so forth happens, you can get a runaway ζ-pinch which magnetically squeezes the conducting path to atomic scales, which in turn raises the magnetic force squeezing it to astronomical levels.

The resulting plasmoid is called "condensed" by Jaitner and his group; I think the choice of the word is inspired. Previous descriptions either don't capture the real dynamics of the phenomenon ("EVs", "charge clusters") or anything significant at all ("exotic vacuum objects," "strange radiation"). Condensation in the formation process reasonably describes the reduction of the conducting path to atomic dimensions, and not incidentally forces nuclei that have been captured by the excess of negative charge into considerably closer proximity than they could be found even in normal, solid, "condensed," matter. This is not your grandfather's plasma.

... and if it should turn out that the core current in a condensed plasmoid is in fact superconducting, the word "condense" is already used in the theory of superconductivity to refer to the same phenomenon.

Epistemic status check: condensed plasmoids are undeniably a real thing. They have been observed by many experimenters and were studied extensively by Kenneth Shoulders in the 80s (he called them "EVs"). If you wish to study them yourself, extensive and detailed information can be found in US patent US5018180A. (But be careful -- the Russian researchers call them "strange radiation" for a reason.) The physical theory and interpretation here are new in detail but phenomena suggesting nuclear activity, including elemental transmutation, radiation (including hard X-rays), and inexplicably large energy generation, have been experimentally verified again and again.

The result is a state where the nuclei are cold, by processes reminiscent of laser cooling in optical tweezers, but at the same time forced together close enough for fusion to occur. What then?

Normally you would expect that from fusion (of anything to the left of iron-56 in the curve of binding energy) you would get energetic nucleus fragments (protons, neutrons, alpha particles, etc) and serious gamma rays out as a result. You can fire basketballs into a trash can with a catapult but don't expect them to make a nice soft landing and sit there. Here's where we get to the second part of my revelations at IWAHLM-16 -- the progress in the quantum mechanics of down-conversion by the MIT team. What that means is that there are recognized pathways for a giant dollop of energy not to explode a nucleus the way it normally would, but to parcel out its energy to a host of smaller recipients, like the electrons forming the current of the plasmoid.

After this, it's all details. The devil is in them, of course, but key elements of the physics may be coming into sight. The condensation of the plasmoid is in a runaway mode until the electrons can't be squeezed any further. At that point the plasmoid is negatively charged and nuclei are attracted into it, where they may be squeezed close enough together to fuse. The plasmoid, which if it isn't technically superconducting in the condensed state is doing something quantum mechanical enough to act like it, supports the down-conversion dynamics. So each, or at at least enough of, the nuclear fusions add energy to the plasmoid current, which keeps it going or can even produce more energy than went in.

Once we get a solid understanding of the physics, our new energy revolution will be about where the Industrial Revolution was in 1643 when Torricelli invented the barometer. Technological progress moves faster now, though, so we might live to see some useful results. Like megawatt generators you can carry in a pocket that use (tiny amounts of) air as fuel.

[Next post here.]

Paradigm shift in cold fusion?

 Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of “X,” the unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles of chemicals on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open window.

—E. E. “Doc” Smith, The Skylark of Space

Chapter 5 of "Flying Car" opens with this quotation from the iconic space opera. I then proceed to compare the rambunctious events in the novel to the almost-as-rambunctious events of the first few years of the cold fusion saga. There was enough of an amusing similarity to inspire the comparison -- in the novel, Seaton was an electrochemist doing electrolysis experiments with platinum-group metals, for example -- and to include the science fiction novel in the discussion of an extended episode of actual science.

But at this point it is worth our time to consider the differences. In real life, Fleischmann and Pons, after their original startling burn-through event and subsequent more careful experiments involving heat gain, continued doing exploratory experiments, with spotty results. Other experimenters got similarly spotty results, occasionally getting excess heat and sometimes, as with Mizuno in Japan, run the current for months and get nothing, then suddenly get 10 times as much heat out as you were putting in, and sometimes the reactor would produce power for days even after the input power was turned off. There were even, thankfully rare, explosions.

Mizuno's "Heat after Death" reactor

In the novel, by contrast, Our Hero does not continue experiments but instead sits down to work out the basic theory of the thing before fooling around with it. Meanwhile the bad guys try to steal the discovery, run off and do experiments without any theoretical understanding, and blow themselves up. 

Sorry, but that's the difference between a SF novel and reality. In real life, science proceeds by the slow, groping-in-the-dark methods of the experimenter. The first version of "Flying Car" came with an appendix listing all the experimenters who had died in the quest for flying machines. The names filled a page. It is only after the accumulation of knowledge from experiment that we know enough to form useful models. Even Newton, genius though he certainly was, needed both the painstaking observations of Tycho and regularities worked out by Kepler to make the breakthrough into a modern understanding of solar system dynamics.

People have been trying to understand cold fusion phenomena for 35 years and don't seem to have made an awful lot of progress. A lot of detail has been collected but nothing you could call a set of generally applicable organizing principles. It's not that there isn't a theory; it is that there are hundreds of theories and none of them has shown enough overall explanatory power to displace the others.

It's my experience that when you get into a situation like this, it's because you just have the wrong model of what's going on, and you aren't interpreting your evidence appropriately. God isn't sending lightning to strike your church because the congregation is sinning; Maxwell's equations are sending lightning to strike your church because it is the tallest pointed object in the area. All the squabbling over who's sinning the most is, to steal a phrase, not even wrong.

 Thomas Kuhn would have said that anomalies are accumulating and a paradigm shift is eminent. 

I recently attended IWAHLM-16 (a conference in memoriam of Bill Collis) in Strasbourg. The workshops are perhaps second to the main ICCF conference series. I hadn't expected much, but Strasbourg has 99 Michelin-rated restaurants and it fit into my schedule; I thought I would get to say Hi to some old friends. 

I was pleasantly surprised. There were two new things, one of which I had known about and one I had missed, even though if I had been paying close attention I might have picked up on. 

First, the one I knew about, is Peter Hagelstein's (an MIT physics prof) quantum mechanics-based theories of how a fusion (or other nuclear) reaction might spread its resulting energy out over a (very) large number of things, such as a lot of atoms' motions comprising heat, instead of spewing protons and neutrons and gamma rays around as happens when you achieve fusion in a particle accelerator. This work had advanced significantly, there is a whole group of grad students and researchers involved in it, and a "big paper" is expected soon. 

The other new thing wasn't really new, and indeed I had been seeing it for some time but filtering it out. Cold fusion tends to attract enough people with way-out theories, so much that you would waste way too much time if you tried to seriously consider all of them. So one develops mental filters to make a first cut and allow you to spend your time thinking about the things that have a greater chance of turning into useful and explanatory theories.

Among the things I had been filtering out were "strange radiation" and "exotic vacuum objects" or "EVOs". They might as well have been saying "UFOs" as far as I was concerned.  So before I proceed, lest you have the same reaction, let's state a few things that are well-known, incontrovertible, mainstream physics.

• Plasma is the 4th state of matter, and indeed almost all the matter in the universe is plasma: stars. Lightning is also plasma. 
• Fusion occurs in plasma; indeed most of the mainstream experimental fusion reactors use plasma.
• The Z-pinch (sometimes ζ-pinch) effect is a phenomenon of bog-standard electromagnetic theory: although stationary like charges repel, moving charges (currents) in parallel produce magnetic fields that tend to attract. (Which force wins depends on details.) The ζ-pinch effect is used in virtually every plasma-based experimental fusion reactor.

And here are some things that are not so well-known, but which are well-supported by historical and experimental evidence:

• A plasmoid is a (more-or-less) stable configuration of plasma, currents, and magnetic fields; the most well-know example is ball lightning.
• Plasmoids can be created in the laboratory in sizes ranging from ball lightning down to microscopic. This has been done by multiple researchers over the 20th century, all of whom named them something different!
• Microscopic plasmoids in contact with metal surfaces leave characteristic craters and other surface deformations.
• Working, i.e. heat-producing, cold fusion experiments are typically found to have left similar stigmata on electrode surfaces.
• In a series of successful cold fusion experiments at SPAWAR, IR videos of the electrodes showed that the process was characterized by the twinkling of thousands of points of heat on the electrode surface.

The hypothesis is that microscopic plasmoids form an environment that supports fusion. I had seen the talk by Gordon linked above, at ICCF-21, and a talk by Jaitner at ICCF-22 laying out the hypothesis, but hadn't made the connection. It wasn't until I ran into Jaitner again at IWAHLM-16, when he had moved from theory to experimental results, that I made the connection.

Will all this constitute a paradigm shift? I think it could. Condensed plasmoids could explain why fusion occurs and the MIT down-conversion quantum mechanics why it provides energy in a way that keeps the plasmoid going without external power. (Why "condensed"? Next post (here), or just watch the talk!)