Fusion by field conditioning rather than by heat

Why the library suggests it

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.