STM-D-0392Paper2010Published and peer-reviewed

A primer for electroweak induced low-energy nuclear reactions

Y. N. Srivastava · A. Widom · L. Larsen

Summary and citation · read the original at the source

In one page

Yogendra Srivastava, Allan Widom and Lewis Larsen argue that three situations that look nothing alike — a hydrogen-loaded metal surface, a thin wire blown apart by a current pulse, and a magnetic loop arching above a sunspot — all run on the same engine. In each, electromagnetic energy spread thinly across an enormous number of slow electrons gets collected onto a few fast ones. An electron carrying that much energy can combine with a proton to make a neutron and a neutrino. That step is a weak interaction, so it has no Coulomb barrier to climb at all; what it has instead is an energy threshold, and the paper is about how ordinary matter pays it. The neutrons that follow are swallowed by neighbouring nuclei, and the transmutations release the heat. The authors give order-of-magnitude numbers for all three cases and close with a practical claim: devices built on this could deliver heat without long-lived waste, hard gamma rays, or free neutrons escaping.

Why it matters hereChapter 12 is about getting nuclear work out of ordinary matter by changing the electromagnetic environment rather than by brute heat and pressure, and this is the paper where that idea is stated at its most general — one mechanism, three settings, numbers for each. Chapter 9 gets its filaments explained from the same page: the exploding wire and the solar flux tube are treated as the same object at two scales, and both are places where collective current does work no single particle could.

What it claims

01There is no Coulomb barrier in the way of making a neutron from an electron and a proton — the two attract each other, and the reaction proceeds by the weak interaction. What stands in the way is an energy threshold. A free neutron decays to a proton, an electron and an antineutrino with about 0.78 million electronvolts to spare, so the reverse reaction needs at least that much fed into an electron-proton pair that starts with almost no kinetic energy. Finding a mechanism inside condensed matter that can supply megaelectronvolt-scale energy is the problem the whole paper sets out to solve.Section 2, Equations 5 and 6
Settled physics
02On a loaded palladium hydride surface the protons form a full layer and oscillate together as a surface plasmon mode. Neutron-scattering measurements on palladium hydride give a sharp oscillation peak at about 60 millivolts and a mean proton displacement of about 2.2 angstroms; from those measured numbers the authors estimate a mean local electric field of roughly 28.8 times ten to the eleventh volts per metre, against the roughly 2 times ten to the eleventh volts per metre the threshold requires. The field available is more than ten times the field needed, and an electron riding in it behaves as though its mass were multiplied by a factor of at least 2.53.Section 3, Equations 26 and 27
Published and peer-reviewed
03The authors put a number on the production rate. Taking the usual Fermi weak coupling, the heavy electron mass and the 1.3 megaelectronvolt neutron-proton mass difference, and assuming a surface density of ten to the sixteenth heavy-electron and proton pairs per square centimetre, they estimate about 1.2 times ten to the thirteenth neutron productions per square centimetre per second, multiplied by the square of how far the mass factor exceeds its 2.53 threshold.Section 3, Equations 28 to 31
Published and peer-reviewed
04Because the neutrons are born from many protons oscillating in step across a patch of surface, they carry almost no momentum — a wavelength of about ten to the minus three centimetres. Their absorption cross-section is then enormous, of order two times ten to the eighth barns, and their mean free path is about 50 angstroms. Practically every neutron is absorbed within a few atomic spacings, so essentially none escapes as a free neutron; mass-renormalised surface electrons act as a second shield that keeps megaelectronvolt gamma rays in as well. What is left to observe is the heat from transmutation. A lithium-coated surface, for instance, runs a cycle whose lithium-to-helium leg releases about 26.9 megaelectronvolts.Section 3, Equations 32 to 35
Published and peer-reviewed
05The magnetic version of the same mechanism is the exploding wire. The natural scale is the Alfvén current of about 17 kiloamperes; the collective inductive energy per electron removed from the current rises as the current relative to that value, times the electrons’ mean speed. At a current about 200 times the Alfvén value and a mean speed of a quarter of light, the authors get about 25 megaelectronvolts per electron — far past the threshold — although conservation limits the fraction that can actually react to roughly six parts in ten thousand. This also explains why Rutherford’s much more energetic but dilute 100-kiloelectronvolt beam in vacuum produced nothing: in vacuum, mutual Coulomb repulsion in the beam cancels the Amperian attraction between the currents, while inside a wire the positive background screens the repulsion and leaves the attraction intact.Sections 2 and 4, Equations 4, 11 and 37
Published and peer-reviewed
06What to watch: the paper closes by saying that realistic possibilities exist for designing devices on this principle, producing excess heat at low cost without lethal nuclear waste, dangerous gamma rays or unwanted neutrons, and that the tools and know-how are within reach of presently available technology. The measurement that would settle it is the one the authors point straight at — a hydride surface run under known loading, with the transmutation products identified and the heat accounted for, alongside detectors placed to confirm that free neutrons and megaelectronvolt gammas really do stay inside the material.Section 6, concluding paragraph
What to watch

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-010-0143-3Published as Pramana — Journal of Physics 75, number 4, pages 617 to 637 (October 2010), under the Springer licence recorded in the Crossref deposit; no Creative Commons statement appears on the record. The authors posted the same work to arXiv on 1 October 2008 as arXiv:0810.0159v1, under the arXiv non-exclusive distribution licence, which is not an open licence either. This sheet was therefore written from the arXiv preprint, downloaded and read in full on 2026-09-08 — eight pages, six sections, forty-four references — and no text of the paper is reproduced here. Locators below cite the preprint’s own section and equation numbers; the journal version carries the same argument under the title A primer for electroweak induced low-energy nuclear reactions. Semantic Scholar links the DOI and the arXiv identifier to one another, which is how the preprint was identified as the version of record’s source.

How to cite it

Y. N. Srivastava, A. Widom, L. Larsen (2010) A primer for electroweak induced low-energy nuclear reactions. doi:10.1007/s12043-010-0143-3

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs