Historical research guide · 0064 · 2026
The Trajectory of Recent Solid State Fusion Results
Lawrence P Forsley
In one minute
Lawrence Forsley — chief technology officer of Global Energy Corporation and deputy principal investigator on NASA Glenn’s lattice confinement fusion work — wrote this NASA technical memorandum to set the last decade of solid-state fusion results side by side. His point is that two large programmes ran at the same time without knowing about each other. NASA has funded this line since 1989 and restarted it in earnest in 2012; Google Research began funding it in 2014 through Berkeley Lab, the University of British Columbia and MIT. Both ended up in the same journals — Nature, Nature Communications, the Journal of Applied Physics, Physical Review C — and Google’s side produced two granted patents on electron screening. Forsley reports that the newest Nature Communications result finds deuterium–deuterium fusion in metal hydrides flattening onto a floor below about 2 keV instead of dying away exponentially, reproducibly in both palladium and titanium. Those separate efforts, he writes, are what prompted the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E programme and then DARPA’s MARRS programme. He closes with the measurements he wants made next.
Connection
Chapter 12 treats the Coulomb barrier as an adjustable quantity rather than a wall, and this memorandum is the paper trail for that reading — the same screening physics turning up in NASA, Google, Canadian and ARPA-E laboratories, in Nature-family journals, in granted patents, and now inside a DARPA programme.
From the source
Electron screening inside a loaded metal lattice increases nuclear reaction rates by about 10¹⁸ times over the bare Gamow factor at centre-of-mass energies well below 5 keV, and the screening equations should now be carried into fusion codes such as INL’s FROG and the University of Rochester’s TriForce.Significance, items 1.2.1–1.2.2
Deuterium–deuterium fusion yield in metallic hydrides shows a pronounced plateau — a finite yield floor — below about 2 keV rather than the expected exponential suppression, observed reproducibly in both palladium and titanium hosts.Next Steps, item 3.3.2, quoting Enhanced nuclear fusion in the sub-keV energy regime, Nature Communications, July 2026
NASA’s two 2020 Physical Review C papers led to lattice confinement fusion driven by inertial electrostatic confinement, and from there to a commercialised multi-state neutron generator built by Astral Systems Ltd in the United Kingdom.Abstract, paragraph 1
NASA and Google funded the same phenomenon independently and without knowledge of each other — NASA from 1989 and again from 2012, Google Research from 2014 — and those separate efforts provided the impetus for the DoE ARPA-E LENR programme and then the DARPA DSO programme Mechanisms for Amplification of Fusion Reaction Rates in Solids (MARRS).Abstract, paragraphs 1 and 3
The next measurements are to re-process the Berkeley Lab and UC Davis data above 3 MeV to look for the boosted neutrons NASA observed in 2020, and to measure the exit-channel ratio D(d,n)³He to D(d,p)T against the conventional 50:50 split.Next Steps, items 3.1–3.2; Significance, item 3
The way in
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20260007648How to cite it
Lawrence P Forsley (2026) The Trajectory of Recent Solid State Fusion Results https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20260007648