Francesco Celani (INFN)*{} -Frascati, Italy)
*{Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.}
I began experiment to check the Cold Fusion effect just 6 days after Fleischmann and Pons' announcement of March 23, 1989. The main reason was to disprove their discovery about neutron emission.
I considered myself a little bit expert about low level neutron emission because I was one of the people, together with my "neutron teacher" Professor Sandro Rindi, able to measure the ultra low and anomalous energy distribution emission of neutrons during the construction of Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory in Italy (the largest one in the world). We spent, from 1985, over two years to build the special low-noise Charge-Pre-Amplifier and select very high sensitivity \pref{3}He neutron detector.
After some calibration tests at Frascati National Laboratory, we moved at the middle of April in 1989, with our simple Cold Fusion cell, again inside of the underground laboratory. In that place we have studied not only Pd-D system but also Ti-D one. Later we studied even "superconducting" state. Several interesting studies we made using an weak neutron source to check the possibility of enhanced fission rate in deuterated materials.
It is very surprised that, after 9 years of working about anomalous nuclear emission and excess heat measurement, we reconfirm what we observed at the beginning of this strange experimentation: the anomalous effects happen only during strong non-equilibrium conditions on over deuterated samples.
During this long and hard working, I can't forget the valuable help given me several Japanese Scientists that later became also my private friends: Makoto Okamoto, Akito Takahashi, Kazuaki Matsui, Naoto Asami, Hideo Ikegami, Tadahiko Mizuno, Jirota Kasagi, Hideo Kozima and least but not last, my pretty wife Missa Nakamura that I met at the first time during ICCF3 (Nagoya 1992).