Historical research guide · 0623 · 2006

Observation of nuclear transmutation reactions induced by D2 gas permeation through Pd complexes

Yasuhiro Iwamura · Takehiko Itoh · Mitsuru Sakano · Noriko Yamazaki · Shizuma Kuribayashi · Yasuko Terada · Tetsuya Ishikawa · Jirohta Kasagi

In one minute

Yasuhiro Iwamura’s team at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built a deceptively simple device: a sandwich of palladium and calcium oxide with a target element painted on top, deuterium gas pressed against one face and vacuum on the other, so deuterium atoms stream steadily through the metal for one to two weeks. Elements placed on the surface come back changed. Caesium turns into praseodymium, strontium into molybdenum — and in this paper, barium into samarium, a jump of twelve in mass and six in atomic number. The team checked the samarium by two independent instruments and ruled out the molecular fragments that could imitate it. They also carried the apparatus to SPring-8, Japan’s national synchrotron, and watched praseodymium appear while the deuterium was still flowing. Swap the calcium-oxide layer for magnesium oxide and nothing happens, which points at what the layer is doing: a beam test at Tohoku University found the deuterium density inside the sandwich is ten times that of ordinary palladium.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about nuclear reactions that happen inside a lattice rather than inside a plasma, and this is the most methodically cross-checked example of them: the same result more than sixty times, on instruments from five different families, in a laboratory belonging to one of Japan’s largest engineering companies. If a metal structure can raise deuterium density tenfold and change what nuclei do, then the environment around a nucleus is an engineering variable — which is the whole premise the chapter is built on.

From the source

The method is deuterium permeation, not electrolysis. One face of a palladium complex — bulk palladium, then alternating calcium oxide and palladium layers, then a thin palladium film — is exposed to deuterium gas at about one atmosphere while the other face is held under vacuum, so deuterium atoms dissociate, diffuse through the metal and are released on the far side. A target element such as caesium, strontium or barium is deposited on the top film, and the surface is analysed without leaving the chamber by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy.Sec. 1, Introduction; Fig. 1; Sec. 2, Experimental
The earlier results this paper builds on are stated as a list. Caesium was transmuted into praseodymium after about one week of permeation at roughly one atmosphere and about 70 degrees Celsius, demonstrated in more than sixty cases with reproducibility close to one hundred percent; strontium was transmuted into molybdenum three times after two weeks, with an isotopic composition unlike natural molybdenum; the praseodymium was cross-checked by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, X-ray absorption near edge structure, X-ray fluorescence and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry; the active zone was a surface region only about one hundred ångström deep; and the conversion rate was positively correlated with the deuterium flux through the complex.Sec. 1, Introduction, summary points 1 to 6
The new result is barium into samarium. With natural barium deposited electrochemically and two weeks of permeation, clear samarium peaks appeared twice in the photoemission spectrum, and the secondary-ion spectrum showed mass 150 in the permeated sample that cannot be accounted for by palladium-calcium, barium-oxide or barium-carbon molecular ions, so samarium-150 is present. With mass-137-enriched barium, mass 149 rose by about an order of magnitude in both of two experiments, read as samarium-149. Both belong to a family of reactions in which mass increases by twelve and atomic number by six, alongside the already observed increases of eight in mass and four in atomic number that give caesium into praseodymium and strontium into molybdenum.Abstract; Sec. 3, Results and Discussion; Figs. 4 to 7; Table 1
The calcium-oxide layer is not decoration. Praseodymium was detected in three used samples built with normal complexes and was not seen in an experiment run without a calcium-oxide layer; when calcium oxide was replaced with magnesium oxide, two experiments out of two showed no praseodymium at all even though the deuterium flow rates were adequate at two to three standard cubic centimetres per minute. A deuteron beam bombardment experiment at Tohoku University measured the deuterium density of the palladium-calcium-oxide complex as one order of magnitude larger than that of normal palladium, which is the authors’ leading explanation for what the layer does.Sec. 3, Results and Discussion; Figs. 9 and 11; Sec. 4, Concluding Remarks
The products are not concentrated impurities. Depth profiles measured by both time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry and photoemission spectroscopy show caesium decreasing continuously from the surface and no praseodymium at all in unpermeated background samples, that caesium does not diffuse or migrate under the permeation conditions used, and that the caesium-to-praseodymium reaction occurs in the near-surface region up to about ten nanometres — so the authors judge it very difficult to imagine the detected praseodymium as anything but a transmutation product.Sec. 3, Results and Discussion; Fig. 10
What to watch is the mechanism and the replication ledger. The authors state plainly that no complete theory explains the results without assumptions and that the observed processes must belong to a new category of nuclear reactions in condensed matter. Their named next measurements are a Mössbauer study of samarium-149, whose excitation energy of 22.5 keV can be reached with synchrotron radiation, and a resonant nuclear reaction using lithium-7 to profile deuterium near the surface, both planned with the University of Tokyo. Positive replications are reported by Takahashi and Higashiyama in a gaseous environment and by Celani’s team in an electrochemical one, with the Naval Research Laboratory then planning its own.Sec. 3, closing paragraphs; Sec. 4, Concluding Remarks

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812774354_0027

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

REGISTRY CORRECTIONS. The record reached the library with the publisher’s all-capitals headline title and all-capitals author names, and with the journal’s font markup left inside the title; both are restored here to normal case as the paper itself prints them. The volume is Condensed Matter Nuclear Science: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, held in Marseille, France, from 31 October to 5 November 2004 and published by World Scientific, Singapore, in 2006 — so the conference year is 2004 and the publication year 2006. LICENCE AND TEXT. The published chapter is closed access with no Creative Commons statement, so this page carries no reproduced text. TEXT ACTUALLY READ. The claims and the summary are written from the authors’ own manuscript of the paper, which is free to read in the LENR-CANR library and was read there in full. AFFILIATIONS. Iwamura, Itoh, Sakano, Yamazaki and Kuribayashi were at the Advanced Technology Research Center of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.; Terada at the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute; Ishikawa at the Coherent X-ray Optics Laboratory, SPring-8 and RIKEN; Kasagi at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Tohoku University. The synchrotron work was done on beamline BL37XU at SPring-8 under JASRI grant 2004B0456-NXb-np. ONE THING LEFT AS PRINTED. In the section on the in-situ synchrotron runs the manuscript contains two adjacent sentences that contradict each other on whether praseodymium was seen in three used samples; the claims below use only the unambiguous sentence, which states that praseodymium was detected in three used samples with normal complexes and not in the run without a calcium-oxide layer. A SIBLING SHEET. A closely related transmutation paper in this library, on stable-isotope transmutation in growing biological systems, is still an unfilled skeleton and so is not linked below.

How to cite it

Yasuhiro Iwamura, Takehiko Itoh, Mitsuru Sakano, Noriko Yamazaki, Shizuma Kuribayashi, Yasuko Terada, Tetsuya Ishikawa, Jirohta Kasagi (2006) Observation of nuclear transmutation reactions induced by D2 gas permeation through Pd complexes doi:10.1142/9789812774354_0027

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion