Historical research guide · 0500 · 2011
Bose–Einstein Condensate Theory of Deuteron Fusion in Metal
Yeong E. Kim
In one minute
This is Yeong Kim’s full statement of the theory the site’s chapter twelve keeps meeting. Load deuterium into a metal until the deuterons become mobile, confine them in a grain a few nanometres across, and Kim argues they behave as one shared quantum object — a Bose–Einstein condensate. Two consequences follow. The fusion rate loses its Gamow factor, the exponential Coulomb penalty that makes low-energy fusion vanishingly rare in free space, so reactions become possible at room-temperature energies. And the products change: helium-4 dominates, with almost no neutrons and almost no gamma ray, which is exactly the pattern electrolysis and gas-loading experiments have been reporting since Fleischmann and Pons. Kim then does the hardest bookkeeping in the field. He shows the 23.85 million electronvolts is carried away as ordinary slowing-down loss by deuterons sharing the recoil, and he explains the enormous tritium-to-neutron ratio through a sub-threshold resonance. He closes with six experiments that would confirm or refute it.
Connection
Chapter twelve needs a mechanism, not just an anomaly, and this is the paper that supplies one built entirely out of textbook physics — condensation, stopping power, resonance — with no new force invented anywhere in it. It is also the paper that names the experiments, which is what the site asks of any claim on the ladder.
From the source
The whole theory rests on one hypothesis: that mobile deuterons inside a micro- or nano-scale metal particle form a Bose–Einstein condensate. Kim states plainly that this makes the theory inapplicable to bulk metal, which offers no well-defined localized trapping potential, and that the hypothesis has to be verified by independent experiment.Sect. 3, opening; Sect. 4, first paragraph
Ten reported experimental observations are accounted for by the same mechanism — suppression of the Coulomb barrier, excess heat of nuclear scale, helium-4 production matched to the heat with no 23.8 MeV gamma ray, far more tritium than neutrons, hot spots and surface craters, the requirement of deuteron mobility, and the requirement of deuterium purity.Sect. 2, observations a to j; Sect. 10
The condensate fraction is calculated as a function of temperature for a deuteron spacing of 2.5 angstroms: about 8.4 per cent at 300 kelvin, about 44 per cent at liquid-nitrogen temperature and about 94 per cent at liquid-hydrogen temperature — which turns cooling the sample into a direct prediction, since the total fusion rate scales with the ground-state occupation.Sect. 3.2
The energy problem is solved without any new physics. In a 5 nanometre palladium particle holding about 4450 deuterons, the 23.85 MeV is shared so each deuteron carries about 5.36 keV; the calculated chance of that deuteron then causing a conventional hot-fusion reaction while slowing down is about five parts in a thousand million million, giving a branching ratio near ten to the minus eleven. The release therefore heats the metal by ordinary stopping power, with no tritium or neutron signature, and no hypothesis of energy transfer to lattice vibrations is required.Sect. 5, Eqs. (8) to (12)
The reported tritium-to-neutron ratios of ten million to a thousand million, against a free-space ratio of about one, are explained by a sub-threshold resonance through the 0-plus excited state of helium-4 at 20.21 MeV with a width of 0.5 MeV, which opens the tritium channel and leaves the neutron channel closed.Sect. 6; Sect. 10, second paragraph
Kim names the tests. Smaller palladium particles should fuse faster than larger ones — consistent with Arata and Zhang at 5 nanometres and Kitamura at 10 nanometres, and with Purdue’s own null result on clumped 80 to 180 nanometre palladium blacks. Rates should rise at low temperature and at high pressure. And the cleanest check of the condensate itself is a diffusion measurement: deuterons should diffuse faster than protons in metal as the temperature falls.Sect. 8.1 to Sect. 8.6
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72132How to cite it
Yeong E. Kim (2011) Bose–Einstein Condensate Theory of Deuteron Fusion in Metal doi:10.70923/001c.72132