Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion
Curtis P. Berlinguette · Yet-Ming Chiang · Jeremy N. Munday · Thomas Schenkel · David K. Fork · Ross Koningstein · Matthew D. Trevithick
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
In 1989 cold fusion was announced as the future of clean energy generation. The failures to reproduce it that followed did not merely cast doubt on the claim; they effectively removed the subject from serious study altogether. Curtis Berlinguette of the University of British Columbia and six colleagues — at MIT, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Google — thought that judgement might have been premature, and spent several years and roughly thirty researchers finding out. They built the instrumentation, notably high-precision calorimetry, went back over the older claims, and looked hard. They report plainly that they have yet to find any evidence of the effect. What they decline to do is close the file. The programme produced nine peer-reviewed papers and three preprints, and yielded new understanding of highly hydrided metals and of low-energy nuclear reactions — a parameter space the authors call underexplored, and where they say much interesting science remains to be done.
Why it matters hereThe metal-hydride loading and screening physics that chapter 12 is built on is exactly the space this programme spent years instrumenting, and its verdict — no effect found, the parameter space still worth studying — is the honest form of the question; chapter 1 uses it as the model of what a serious, well-funded search looks like when it comes back empty.
What it claims
01The 1989 claim of cold fusion was publicly heralded as the future of clean energy generation, but subsequent failures to reproduce the effect heightened scepticism in the academic community and effectively led to the disqualification of the subject from further study.Abstract
Published and peer-reviewed02Motivated by the possibility that this judgement might have been premature, the authors ran a multi-institution programme to re-evaluate cold fusion to a high standard of scientific rigour — and their efforts have yet to yield any evidence of such an effect.Abstract; the programme description
Published and peer-reviewed03A by-product of the investigations has been new insight into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, and the authors contend that there remains much interesting science to be done in this underexplored parameter space.Abstract; concluding discussion
What to watch04The scale of the effort is part of the result: about thirty graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and staff scientists across the University of British Columbia, MIT, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Google, whose work produced nine peer-reviewed publications and three arXiv preprints.Programme description; the participating institutions’ releases, May 2019
Published and peer-reviewed05The method was to vet the previous claims and to build the instrumentation capable of testing them to modern standards — high-precision calorimetry above all — rather than to argue about the older record.Programme description; experimental sections
Published and peer-reviewed06The standing goal, and the thing that would settle the question either way, is a reproducible reference experiment: a single protocol that others can run and get the same answer from. The team states it continues to search for one.Concluding discussion
What to watch
The way in
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1256-6Published by Nature and held in copyright, so this page carries a summary; the abstract is open at the publisher and at Europe PMC, and the participating universities published their own accounts of the programme in May 2019.
How to cite it
Curtis P. Berlinguette, Yet-Ming Chiang, Jeremy N. Munday, Thomas Schenkel, David K. Fork, Ross Koningstein, Matthew D. Trevithick (2019) Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1256-6
Where it sits in the curriculum
Lattice confinement fusionThe evidence ladderEnergy from the vacuum