Albert Einstein 1879-1955

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

What I Believe [1930]

 

Cold fusion or low-temperature fusion, nuclear fusion of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, at or relatively near room temperature. Fusion, the reaction involved in the release of the destructive energy in a hydrogen bomb, requires extremely high temperatures, and investigations of fusion as a possible energy source have focused on the problems involved in designing an apparatus to contain and sustain such a reaction . In 1989, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, chemists at the Univ. of Utah, announced that an experiment conducted at room temperature using platinum and palladium electrodes immersed in heavy water (deuterium oxide) had produced excess heat and other by-products that they ascribed to a fusion reaction. Attempts to replicate their experiment produced initially conflicting results, but several early announcements of experimental confirmation were later retracted. They were also later criticized for having skewed data to show wrongly the emission of gamma rays at an energy level typical of fusion. Research into the possibility of cold fusion, by Fleischmann and others, has nonetheless continued, because of intriguing but inconclusive experimental results and because of the desirability of producing relatively nonpolluting fusion energy in quantity at any temperature.