This difficult path for truly monumental discoveries was not overlooked by countless traditional physicists in 1989 who said for Cold Fusion to be real it encompasses and must account for two major miracles. The first of these miracles is to pass the, believed to be, nearly impenetrable repulsive Coulomb barrier preventing fusion of two atoms. Here-to-for, it was believed this might only be breached at super high temperatures such as those found it the core of a star. The second miracle, once the first barrier to fusion was passed, was that such fusion must be accompanied instantly by intense radiation. Passing the test of one major miracle is a tough task, passing two is nigh unto impossible… or is it?

COLD fusion is a radiation free nuclear reaction that, in its simplest form, fuses two hydrogen atoms to form a single helium atom. In this fusion, each new helium atom created is accompanied, as Einstein’s equation E=Mc² predicts, by 24 million electron volts of energy. To put this into a more common perspective, 1 gram of hydrogen (cold fusion fuel) can yield 100 billion watts of energy (power). How and where does this occur? It all takes place inside hydrogen loving metals, those metals that soak up hydrogen like a sponge. Hence, cold fusion is solid-state fusion and is best explained using the language we use to explain solid-state electronics.

To begin, we must remember the hydrogen atom is unique in that it has only one electron. When hydrogen enters into hydrogen loving metal it does so by sharing it's electron with the much more massive metal atoms, all of which have many electrons. We know that atoms in metals share many electrons contributing to what is known as the electron or Fermi Sea. This is why electricity conducts so nicely in metals. Well it happens that when a hydrogen atom shares its lone electron with this electron sea what remains is a positively charged nucleus. From many studies, we know that a bare positively charged hydrogen nucleus also conducts in some metals, this is called proton conduction.

When we apply standard solid-state physics equations, those that allow us to calculate and predict the characteristics and behaviour of electrons in metals that we use to manage solid-state electronic devices, to positively charged conducting hydrogen nuclei in the solid-state we find the equations work very well. Since a heavy hydrogen nucleus, a deuteron, is very massive compared to an electron, the wavelength shortens (it is 1/4000^th that of an electron), hence we can only observe solid-state phenomena in very tiny metal lattices, down around a few tens of nanometers. When we look, mathematically, at the wave mechanics of deuterons in such small domains, we can describe and predict what happens to it in the solid-state. The essence of this solid-state condition is that the population of some millions of deuterons in a tiny lattice becomes coherent and now acts as much or more like a wave than a particle. In electron solid-state physics we call this a Bloch wave and in it, each coherent electron appears to occupy every location in the conduction band at once.

This is why when we put an electron in one end of a conductor it appears almost instantly at the other end for our use. It is the same with coherent deuterons in a Bloch wave. The particle nature is still there but greatly changed as each nucleus is now part of a large population making up a coherent wave. Thanks again Albert (and your friend Satyendra Bose) for telling us to be on the lookout for coherent Bose-Einstein Condensate states of matter. And a special thanks to Satyendra for telling us about bosons an important but deeper level part of this story.
(Hint – deuterons are bosons.)

In commonly applied electron solid-state engineering calculations, time as a factor is not so important since things are moving so very fast that time has a rather singular influence. In the massive deuterium solid-state wave, time becomes a very powerful factor as it takes time for these particles/waves to move from one place to the next. So we add time as an important factor back into the solid-state equations and now we are dealing with space-time equations. Under this condition momentum or lack there-of, not velocity, rules and reactions, from a nuclei point of view, are able to take place rather slowly. We can now show that the classical forces of repulsion of like charges, the Coulomb Barrier, in a deuteron solid-state condition may approach zero. In this oscillating sea of deuteron waves tightly confined and influenced by giant atoms of the surrounding lattice, a pair of deuterons may approach very closely pushed together as much by the crowd as they push each other apart. The probability rises of approach near enough for the strong nuclear force to reach out from the nucleus to bring the pair together, creating fusion. The simple fact is that this is now observed to happen in highly reproducible and predictable demonstrations.

This graphic shows a collection of bosonic atoms, originally spread out condensing into a much more confined state known as a Bose Einstein Condensate.

The fist miracle of is passed, overcoming the Coulomb barrier.

Now newly fused the di-deuteron, or excited state helium nucleus, is holding too much energy and it must lose that energy to become normal stable helium. In the familiar classical fusion in plasmas, this energy loss has to happen for the single new nucleus all by itself, as it is alone in the chaos of the plasma and not at all part of a coherent population. In a hot plasma, a collision space environment, the only path to de-excitation is via the emission of radiation, fast particles. In the super condensed environment of cold or solid-state fusion, the new nucleus is a virtually indistinguishable member of a coherent population and as such, the entire population shares the extra energy it holds. In this slow low momentum space, the path to de-excitation is collective sharing of the energy; each member of the population becomes a little more energetic and as they interact with the surrounding big atoms that confine them, they each hand off small amounts of energy over a relatively long time. This is frequently referred to as phonon coupling. So HOT fusion is a two-body reaction that takes place at high velocities in collision space and COLD fusion is a many-body reaction that takes place in momentum space where things happen slowly. Hence, radiation, which is a fast phenomenon, is nearly perfectly prohibited in solid-state cold fusion.

Just what we need to satisfy the second required miracle of cold fusion, no radiation.

So what is next?

Solid-state fusion will usher a new revolution of abundant, inexhaustible, cheap energy in our world. As easily as we make and use solid-state electronics technologies today, we will make and use solid-state fusion energy. These will begin as small energy sources like those we use to heat a bath, a room, or a home but they will be suited to assembling in a compound fashion in the same way we have added more and more solid-state circuits to our electronic devices. The easiest and earliest technologies are very near, as one Japanese woman scientist working in this field in the cold northern reaches of Hokkaido once said…”what I need is hot water for my bath.” That hot water is surely on the way within the next few years. Following it will come all manner of ways to use the heat of cold solid-state fusion.

The author Russ George can be reached at russ@d2fusion.com and welcomes your comments and advice on how to make this explanation better.

PS. About Bosons

Coulomb Barrier Eliminated as explained to me by Julian Brown

That protons/deuterons form wavelike states in certain phases of certain transition metals is not controversial. It is the basis of protonic conduction.

If you worry about the qm repulsion amplitude at small distances consider the following.

The de Broglie wavelength for a deuteron is 4000 times smaller than that of an electron.

This means that when they get into the same lattice cell, the repulsion kills the wavefunction totally by the time they get within nuclear distance of one another. With electrons, it is only a moderate dimming, because the exponential factors have a size proportional to the wavelength. …Right ?

NO. WRONG.

What many people are missing is that deuterons are bosons, not fermions like electrons. The exclusion principle for fermions prevents low momentum (i.e. long-range) scattering amongst themselves, because the out-states are generally already occupied by someone else. This effectively cuts off the small-k part of the Coulomb 1/k k interaction leaving a short-range repulsion of full strength at distances less than about the cell size.

For bosons like deuterons there is no exclusion principle, so the Coulomb repulsion is active for both large and small k BUT because it is so "undisturbed" ALL N(N-1)/2 repulsion terms get mixed symmetrically together and the remaining repulsion between any particular pair is diluted to 1/N what you would expect. This is what the Feymann diagrams and the Schroedinger equation say.

So no Coulomb repulsion when N is big.

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