Historical research guide · 0028 · 2020
Novel nuclear reactions in bremsstrahlung-irradiated deuterated metals
Steinetz, Benyo, Chait et al.
In one minute
This is the experiment. Bruce Steinetz, Theresa Benyo, Arnon Chait and the NASA Glenn team took two deuterium-loaded metals — erbium deuteride and titanium deuteride — and hit them with a bremsstrahlung photon beam of no more than 2.9 million electronvolts. The photons break deuterium nuclei apart, and the neutrons that come off collide with the cold deuterium still packed in the lattice, heating a few of those nuclei enough to fuse. Shielded liquid and plastic scintillator detectors then read what came back out. They measured 2.45-MeV neutrons, the fingerprint of deuterium-deuterium fusion, and they showed the result repeats. They also measured neutrons at roughly 4 and 5 MeV, pointing either to deuterons heated beyond the first collision or to stripping reactions with the host metal itself. The striking part is that the fuel never moves: the reactions happen with the deuterium sitting still inside the lattice.
Connection
This is chapter 12's load-bearing measurement — fusion neutrons detected from cold fuel held in a solid, in a peer-reviewed journal, by a named NASA team. It is what turns the site's claim that the Coulomb barrier is an adjustable quantity into something already recorded on a detector.
From the source
d-D nuclear fusion events were observed in an electron-screened, deuterated metal lattice by reacting cold deuterons with hot deuterons produced by elastically scattered neutrons originating from bremsstrahlung photodissociation.Abstract
Exposure of the deuterated materials ErD3 and TiD2 to photon energies in the range 2.5 to 2.9 MeV produced photodissociation neutrons below 400 keV and also 2.45-MeV neutrons consistent with the 2H(d,n)3He fusion reaction, and the process was shown to be reproducible.Abstract; Section 5, Summary of Results
Neutron energies of approximately 4 and 5 MeV were also measured for TiD2 and ErD3, consistent with either boosted neutrons from kinetically heated deuterons or with Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping reactions in the highly screened environment, where the proton is captured by a host metal nucleus and a fast neutron is ejected.Abstract; Table VI, candidate reactions with host metal isotopes
The deuterated metal supplies fuel densities of 10²² to 10²³ deuterium atoms per cubic centimetre, and shell, lattice and photon-induced plasma screening on top of that density reduce the d-D fusion barrier and increase Coulomb barrier transparency.Section 5, Summary of Results
Deuterons were heated by photoneutrons of about 145 keV average energy from the 2.9-MeV beam, and the companion theoretical paper calculates that neither electrons nor photons alone impart enough deuteron kinetic energy to initiate measurable d-D reactions — the neutron is the necessary intermediary.Section 5, Summary of Results
The reactions run with the deuteron fuel in a stationary centre-of-mass frame, which removes the need to accelerate fuel into a target; the named next measurement is to repeat the campaign with a pulsed beam so that time-of-flight instrumentation can resolve where the higher-energy neutrons come from.Section 5, Summary of Results; Section 6, Future Work
The way in
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044610How to cite it
Steinetz, Benyo, Chait et al. (2020) Novel nuclear reactions in bremsstrahlung-irradiated deuterated metals doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044610