Valerie Jamieson, New Scientist (translation: Dikla Oren)
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Scientists are looking positively at the controversial claim that exploding bubbles in an experiment can simply cause nuclear fusion - the same process through which the sun produces its energy.
In 2002, the team of Rossi Thaliarhan from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, United States, caused a stir by announcing that they were able to cause heavy hydrogen nuclei to undergo nuclear fusion. The team claims to have caused tiny bubbles in acetone to explode inside with the help of sound waves - a process called sonofusion - and the process caused the heavy hydrogen nuclei to fuse.
The process opens up the possibility of a cheap and unlimited source of energy, but critics were quick to point out flaws in the research. The criticism intensified in light of the fact that another team of researchers from Oak Ridge repeated the experiment and failed to find neutrons or radioactive tritium - the hallmarks of nuclear fusion.
Now Taliarkhan, who in the meantime managed to transfer to Purdue University in Indiana, claims that he managed to create a fusion once again - and this time the evidence for it is even more solid.
Although no one has attempted to repeat the latest experiment, Lee Reidinger, deputy director of science and technology at Oak Ridge, says the study underwent rigorous oversight and review before being accepted for publication in Physical Review E.
In the first experiment, Talierchen and his colleagues shot neutrons at a container of cold acetone, and these created tiny bubbles in the liquid. The hydrogen in acetone was replaced by deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron. Sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and collapse several times.
The researchers claimed that when the bubbles collapsed, the temperatures rose to a million degrees, temperatures at which two deuterium nuclei can undergo a fusion process. In the fusion, tritium - another isotope of hydrogen - and a proton or nucleus of helium-3 and a neutron are created, as well as an energy of 2.5 million electron volts.
The team discovered evidence for both types of reactions, but other researchers pointed out discrepancies in the amounts of neutrons and tritium detected, as well as the fact that the detector was aimed to filter out neutrons with an energy of 2.5 million electron volts.
Taliarkhan says that since then he has improved the equipment so that it detects neutrons better. He claims that the vision for fusion is stronger this time: the discovered neutrons have the appropriate energy and their amount corresponds to the amount of tritium discovered.
That may not be enough to silence the critics. Larry Creme, an acoustics expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, believes the new results add credibility to the sonic fusion concept, but he remains skeptical of Talierchen's findings. "I still think no one will believe it," he says.
Link to the original article in New Scientist
Physics expert
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