Historical research guide · 0071 · 2019
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
In one minute
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.
Connection
The 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.
From the source
The 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
Motivated 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
A 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The way in
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1256-6How 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