STM-D-0728Paper2020Published and peer-reviewed

Transmutations and isotopic shifts in LENR experiments

Mahadeva Srinivasan · K.P. Rajeev

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In one page

Mahadeva Srinivasan spent his career at India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, and here he gathers what several laboratories found when they looked at their cold-fusion cathodes afterwards and asked what the metal had turned into. The pattern is consistent across very different setups. Load palladium or nickel with deuterium — by electrolysis, by glow discharge, by simply letting the gas diffuse through a foil — and afterwards the surface holds elements that were not there before, in proportions that do not match the natural mixture of isotopes. That second part is the strong evidence: a stray impurity arrives with its ordinary isotope ratio, so a ratio that is wrong points at a nuclear process rather than at contamination. Srinivasan walks through the Russian glow-discharge work, Miley’s thin-film electrolysis with its four-humped yield curve, Iwamura’s deuterium-permeation runs that turn caesium into praseodymium, and the microbial experiments — and asks whether these products are a side effect or the main event.

Why it matters hereChapter 12 asks what actually happens inside a loaded lattice, and this is the strand of evidence that answers with the periodic table itself: not just heat, not just helium, but new elements with the wrong isotope ratios, found by half a dozen groups using different loading methods and different analytical instruments.

What it claims

01Transmutation is a distinct phenomenon from fusion, and the difference is who takes part. Srinivasan defines transmutations as nuclear reactions between the loaded deuterons or protons and the nuclei of the host metal itself — palladium, nickel, titanium — or of higher-charge nuclei present as alloying elements, cathode impurities or electrolyte constituents. In fusion the lattice nuclei serve a catalytic role and are not themselves involved; in transmutation they participate directly.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section I, Introduction, opening paragraph
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02The decisive signature is an isotope ratio, not a new element. Finding traces of an element absent before a run does not by itself imply transmutation, because impurities can plate out of the electrolyte or be sputtered and redeposited by the plasma. But if the isotopic distribution of a newly found element, or of material already present, differs significantly from natural abundance after a run, that points to a nuclear process — contamination arrives with the ordinary ratio. Modern secondary-ion mass spectrometry measures those ratios accurately, and neutron activation analysis provides a cross-check free of the molecular-ion interference that mass spectrometry can suffer.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section II, General remarks on experimental methodology
Settled physics
03Glow discharge produces large, spatially concentrated element changes. Karabut and Savvatimova ran a double-walled quartz chamber with molybdenum electrodes, deuterium at 3 to 10 torr, 50 volts to 1.2 kilovolts and about 100 milliamperes over roughly one square centimetre of cathode, starting from palladium whose impurity content was confirmed to be under 0.01 percent. At ICCF-5 they reported spots where silver reached 12 to 15 percent and molybdenum 5 to 7 percent, with arsenic, bromine, rubidium, strontium, yttrium and cadmium — none of them present in any construction material — at 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Savvatimova later found the largest changes in hot spots near grain boundaries, isotopes raised by factors of 5 to 1000, and isotopic changes still continuing three to five months after the discharge.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section III, Russian glow discharge measurements
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04Thin-film electrolysis gives a reproducible four-humped product spectrum. George Miley analysed the palladium-nickel multilayer coatings on the roughly one-millimetre plastic microspheres of James Patterson’s packed-bed cathode, then rebuilt the experiment in his own laboratory with an all-nonmetallic cell to exclude contamination. Product yields plotted against atomic number show four humps — atomic number 6 to 18 peaking at magnesium and silicon, 22 to 30 peaking at iron and zinc, 44 to 50 peaking at silver and cadmium, and 75 to 85 peaking at gold — and in some runs as much as 40 percent of the initial metal atoms of the thin film had been transmuted. Mizuno of Hokkaido University independently found a similar four-humped spectrum on heavy-water-electrolysed palladium cathodes.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section IV, Electrolysis experiments, and Figures 3 and 4
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05Deuterium permeation gives the cleanest result of all, because nothing is taken out of the apparatus to be measured. Yasuhiro Iwamura’s group at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built multilayer palladium and calcium-oxide foil complexes and let deuterium gas diffuse through them, measuring elemental composition and isotope ratios in place by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and secondary-ion mass spectrometry. They observed iron-57 to iron-56 ratios as high as 1.8 in selected spots against a natural value of 0.023; carbon converting to magnesium-24 and then on to silicon-28 and sulphur-32; lithium-7 coated on the surface becoming fluorine-19 and then aluminium-27; and caesium-133 becoming praseodymium-141. Each step corresponds to the capture of deuterons in pairs — two, four or six at a time.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section V, Deuterium gas permeation (Iwamura), and Figures 6 and 7
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06What to watch: whether transmutation is a side effect or the source of the heat. Srinivasan poses this as the open question — in palladium-deuterium systems helium appears to be the main nuclear product, but in nickel-hydrogen systems it is unresolved, and both Miley and the Russian groups were driven to look for transmutation products precisely because neutrons, tritium and helium were not found in quantities matching the heat they measured. The measurement he names as the one that would settle it is reliable analysis of spent nickel fuel powders from a working nickel-hydrogen device.Srinivasan, 2012 overview, section VI, Conclusions, paragraphs on the source of excess heat
What to watch

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-815944-6.00013-0LICENCE. Chapter 13, pages 233 to 262, of Cold Fusion: Advances in Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, Elsevier 2020, ISBN 9780128159446, under Elsevier’s standard copyright; Unpaywall and OpenAlex record it closed with no repository copy and Crossref releases no abstract, so no text of it is reproduced here. SOURCE NOT REACHED DIRECTLY. The summary and claims were written on 2026-09-08 from the lead author’s own earlier overview of the same subject under almost the same title, read in full: Mahadeva Srinivasan, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (retired), Transmutations and Isotopic shifts in LENR Experiments: An Overview, a six-page conference paper dated July 2012, free at lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Srinivasantransmutat.pdf, which he describes there as a condensed version of his 2011 review with George Miley and Edmund Storms, chapter 43 of the Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, Wiley. Every locator below cites a section of that 2012 overview. The 2020 chapter adds K.P. Rajeev as coauthor and eight further years of results; readers should take the figures here as Srinivasan’s 2012 values, which is why each is attributed.

How to cite it

Mahadeva Srinivasan, K.P. Rajeev (2020) Transmutations and isotopic shifts in LENR experiments. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-815944-6.00013-0

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion