Fusion by field conditioning rather than by heat

Why the library suggests it

The measurement this card names, as a bench: two runs of identical delivered power on one loaded target, a third that reverses the conditioning, and a counter nobody touches in between. Set the shift you are willing to assume, and read how far the counts would have to move before a difference is a result rather than a wobble from one run to the next.

The paired run: conditioned beam against unconditioned

Here is the experiment that would settle a field-conditioning claim, laid out as a bench. One loaded target, one neutron counter, two runs in the same session at the same delivered beam power — the conditioning hardware driven in one, off in the other — and a third run with the conditioning reversed. Nobody touches the counter or the target in between. Set the beam energy, the host metal and the shift you want to test, and read what a difference on that counter would be entitled to claim.

Which run the counter is reading

Run one: conditioning offRun two: conditioning drivenRun three: conditioning reversed

The bench, left to right

Bombarding energy of the beam

2,500

Two deuterons of equal mass, so the collision energy in the centre of mass is half the bombarding energy. The bench opens on 2500 electronvolts, the bombarding energy Kasagi reports.

Host metal, with its measured screening energyDeuterium gas (reference) — 25 electronvolts of screeningTitanium — 27 electronvolts of screeningAluminium — 190 ± 15 electronvolts of screeningZirconium — 297 ± 8 electronvolts of screeningPalladium — 313 ± 2 electronvolts of screeningTantalum — 322 ± 15 electronvolts of screeningPalladium oxide — 600 electronvolts of screening

The host's screening energy is a published measurement, and it is present in every run of the session. It therefore cancels out of the comparison exactly, which is why the bars below carry the assumed shift alone.

Assumed shift from the conditioning

313

This dial is the proposal, not a measurement. Froning, Barrett and Miley published parametric estimates of the input energy such conditioning could save; no experiment has yet compared a conditioned beam with an unconditioned one on the same target, so no number exists to put here.

The dial stops at 600 electronvolts because that is the largest screening energy measured anywhere in this library — palladium oxide, from the Kasagi sheet. The bench will not draw a conditioning larger than a measurement that exists. Kasagi: the measured screening energies that set the scale of this bench, palladium oxide highest at 600 electronvolts

Return to the opening settings

• Run one: conditioning off
• Run two: conditioning driven
• Run three: conditioning reversed

Run two: conditioning driven

What this run would read: At the same delivered power, on the same target, through the same counter, the only quantity that moves is the rate at which pairs tunnel. The bare Coulomb law, Planck's constant and the fine-structure constant are the same in all three runs, and the panel beside the bars reads them back unchanged.

Rate, this run divided by run one:

9

Orders of magnitude against run one:

1.0

Effective shift applied in this run:

313 electronvolts

Collision energy in the centre of mass:

1,250 electronvolts

Reversal control. Run three lands back on run one exactly. A bench that does not do this has not measured the conditioning.

Held fixed across all three runs. Delivered beam power, target loading, counter and geometry, chamber and session. One thing differs between run one and run two, and it is the form of the field.

What a difference on that counter would assert

• That the tunnelling rate depends on the form of the field the nuclei sit in, and not only on the energy delivered to them.
• That the effect is large enough to read at a stated beam energy, in a stated host, at a stated delivered power.
• That it reverses when the conditioning reverses, which separates it from drift in the bench.

What it would not assert

• Nothing about the bare Coulomb law, Planck's constant or the fine-structure constant, which the panel above reads back unchanged in every run.
• Nothing about net energy: the ratio of two counter readings is not a cross-section, not a heat measurement and not a power output.
• Nothing about the mechanism. A rate difference says the form of the field matters; which gauge structure does it is a separate argument.

The settling measurement. The deuterium-deuterium neutron yield at fixed target loading and fixed delivered power, conditioned against unconditioned, with the difference reversing when the conditioning is reversed.

Scope: this bench draws a ratio of tunnelling factors between two runs of the same apparatus. The nuclear physics inside the barrier is held fixed, so the numbers are rates against rates — not a cross-section, not a heat measurement and not a power output. The energy balance of such a machine is a separate measurement that has not been made.

The sheets this bench is built from

• Froning, Barrett and Miley 2012: specially conditioned electromagnetic fields to reduce fusion input energy needs
• Fontana and Baker 2007: high-frequency gravitational-wave induced nuclear fusion, the far more extreme version of the same logic
• Carpinteri and colleagues 2012: neutron production from the fracture of piezoelectric rocks, the cheap companion experiment
• Kasagi: the measured screening energies that set the scale of this bench, palladium oxide highest at 600 electronvolts

David Froning, Terence Barrett and George Miley argue that ordinary electromagnetism has the simplest possible gauge structure, whose angular momentum behaves like that of spin-one particles — which is why like charges repel — while the fields inside a nucleus have a richer structure whose angular momentum behaves like spin-two, for which like charges attract; Barrett had already shown how to derive electromagnetic fields carrying that richer structure, and the paper makes the first parametric estimates of the input energy such conditioning could save (Specially Conditioned EM Fields to Reduce Nuclear Fusion Input Energy Needs, 2012). A far more extreme version of the same logic changes the metric rather than the field: Giorgio Fontana and Robert Baker propose firing focused high-frequency gravitational waves into the fuel, arguing the non-linear memory effect pulls a deuterium electron much closer to its nucleus and raises its effective mass — muon-catalysed fusion without the muon (High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Induced Nuclear Fusion, 2007). And an entirely ordinary setting shows collective electromagnetic fields in condensed matter reaching nuclear energies: crush a piezoelectric rock and the fields on fresh crack surfaces accelerate electrons hard enough to produce neutrons by the standard weak interaction (Neutron production from the fracture of piezoelectric rocks, 2012).

The experiment or build

The buildable version is the field-conditioning one, and the hardware is an undulator or a wound helix imposing a coherent structure on a beam that then illuminates a loaded lattice target. Run the target twice — conditioned beam and unconditioned beam of identical total power — in the same session, with the neutron counter untouched between runs. The settling measurement is the deuterium-deuterium neutron yield at fixed target loading and fixed delivered power, conditioned against unconditioned, with the difference reversing when the conditioning is reversed. The piezoelectric-rock experiment is the cheap companion: it is a hydraulic press, a quartz-bearing sample and a neutron counter, and it is a real published effect that almost nobody has re-measured.