CFRL English News No. 23 (2001. 4. 10)

　　　Cold Fusion Research Laboratory Dr. Hideo Kozima

This is CFRL News (in English) No. 23 translated from Japanese version published for friend researchers of Cold Fusion Research Laboratory directed by Dr. H. Kozima in Portland State University. The e-mail address in PSU is cf-lab.kozima@pdx.edu.

In this issue, there are following items;

1) Proceedings of ICCF8 was published,

2) Report of APS March Meeting at Seattle, and

3) On the Neutron Bands below Zero.

4) Supplement on the “Report of APS March Meeting”

1) Proc. ICCF8, Conference Proceedings Vol. 70 (Italian Physical Society, Bologna, Italy)

The Eighth International Conference on Cold Fusion held in Lerici (la Spezia), Italy on May 21 - 26, 2000 was a big event for cold fusion researchers in the world. The Proceedings of this Conference was published by Italian Physical Society in February and sent to participants. The book is with hard cover and well organized by effort of Chairman Franco Scaramuzzi of the Organizing Committee.

Main contents are divided into seven chapters (with number of papers):

1. Detection of Helium, thought as a Nuclear Ash (5)

2. Excess Heat and Calorimetry (10)

3. Transmutations (6)

4. Loading of H (D); Material Science (8)

5. Detection of Nuclear Emissions (10)

6. Experiments with Stimulation: Energetic Particles, E.M.-Radiation,

Ultrasounds (10)

7. Theories (20).

Total papers included in this Proceedings are 59 (compared with 77 presented at the Conference)

As F. Scaramuzzi writes in the Introduction, the history of the ICCF shows history of cold fusion research. The ICCF8 held with official support from several Italian organizations symbolizes an epoch in the research in the time when application oriented researches have confronted with difficulty. The organizer of this Conference is ENEA (The Italian research agency for energy and environment) and is also sponsored by CNR (National Research Agency), INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) and SIF (Italian Physical Society).

It is valuable to cite several sentences from Introduction by F. Scaramuzzi which show his insight or heritage of Italian science:

“I am convinced that a lot of basic research is still needed in order to better understand the science underlying CF, before practical objectives can be seriously addressed; this can be better pursued by small groups that proceed with this idea clearly in mind. And this is, in my opinion, what is happening. As an example, let me note that at this Conference there were 15 communications by Japanese scientists (more than 20% of the total), mostly from universities, in spite of the disappearance of the two big initiatives quoted above [IMRA and NHE project]. The research program at ENEA Frascati, funded by the Italian Government, is another meaningful example, which, I hope, will be followed by other initiatives of this kind.”

“In my opinion, there is no doubt that we are facing a subject of enormous scientific interest: it can no longer denied that there are many different kinds of nuclear reactions that take place at substantially low energies, and that this implies the existence of collective and coherent interactions among the participants in the events under study.”

An extra burden for the editor of the Proceedings seems manuscripts submitted to the editorial office ignoring editorial principles; “some were presented with an excessive number of pages.” “some papers were presented using a quite poor English,” “sometimes the logic of the presentation itself needed to be improved.” Counting the pages of papers in the Proceedings, we find 19 papers exceeding the limit of 6 pages including the longest of 16 pages. This is an act of outlaws and should not be repeated. To give a penalty of large extra charge will be a mean to prevent illegal presentation. It is conceivable existence of many delayed papers.

2) March Meeting of APS at Seattle on March 12 - 16, 2001

As announced and given the Program in the News No.22, the March Meeting was held in Seattle. I will give short comments on several interesting works from experimental papers below. Abstracts are published in Bulletin of the American Physical Society Vol. 46, No.1, Part II, pp. 944 - 947 (2001)

V14.3 The Measurement of Helium Isotopes to Demonstrate Solid State Nuclear Processes, M.C.H. McKubre et al.

V14.4 Calorimetry of Pd +D Codeposition in a Fleischmann-Pons Dewar Cell, M.H. Miles et al.

V14.6 Ways to Initiate a Nuclear Reaction in Solid Environments, E.K. Storms

V14.10 Plastic Deformation in a Strained Palladium Deuteride Induced by Anomalous Neutron Capture in a Ultraweak Thermalized Neutron Field, A.G. Lipson et al.

V14.11 Anomalous Reaction Phenomena in Metals under High Proton Loading, G.H. Miley et al.

V14.12 How Metallurgical and Geometrical properties of the Samples affect the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions in Solids, P. Tripodi et al.

Comments

V14.3 is an extension of their work including materials presented at ICCF8. He4 was observed in consistent with the excess heat. He3 is considered as decay products of tritium. The experiments with Arata cell take a long time. It is said that original Arata and Zhang experiments took at most six months. In the SRI experiments, the duration was about three months. Quantitative comparison of He4 and the excess heat seems questionable.

V14.4 is the experiments done in NHE Lab. in Hokkaido and determination of the excess heat is controversial among relevant researchers. By the method used by Miles, the excess heat was observed with good reproducibility and its amount increased with temperature of the cell and also with current density. These qualitative tendencies are consistent with Neutron Bands below Zero in TNCF model (see item 3 in this News).

V14.6 is a paper by E.K. Storms who is one of thorough investigator of mechanisms of CFP. Following sentence shows his understanding common to me; ”The phenomenon involves initiating nuclear reactions within special solid structures without applying high energy, ---“

He uses Pt cathode instead of Pd to avoid instability of the PdD system.

V14.10 is data by Lipson at NHE Lab. in Hokkaido. Weak thermal neutron beam is strongly (7.5 times) absorbed in Pd cathodes in electrolysis compared with those without electrolysis. They also observed anomalously high plastic deformation in the subsurface area of the Pd samples. It is interesting to notice similarity of this results to the results obtained and presented at ICCF3 by E. Yamaguchi et al.

V14.11 is the results by G. Miley in Illinois University. Ni/Pd films and Pd wires were used. H (and D) is electrolytically occluded in the samples. The excess heat and oscillations of electric resistance were observed when H/Pd is higher than 0.9.

V14.12 is the experiment by Italian group. Pd films are deposited on Cu substrates to observe its properties in relation with CFP.

As a whole, many presentations are almost repetition of once presented before. ICCF8 (May 21-26, 2000), 2000ANS/ENS International Meeting (Nov.12-16, 2000) and March Meeting of APS (March 12-16, 2001) are too many Conferences to present only brand-new results. Another point I have noticed in the Meeting again is lack of citation of former works with similar results. Without correct inheritance, sound development of CF research will be difficult.

3) Neutron Bands below Zero

In these 13 years after the FPH experiments on the CFP presented in 1989, there have been observed various events belonging to it without unified and satisfactory explanation for them. This is a major reason people outside the CF circle are indifferent to this important phenomenon from scientific and also application points of view.

The necessary conditions of CFP are not found out until now even if several of them became clear. Most important conditions are 1) materials should be 3d and 4d transition-metals, 2) there should be hydrogen isotopes above some critical concentration in the material at least in the surface region, 3) surface layers of foreign atoms should be on the surface of the materials, 4) presence of background neutrons around the experimental system. Without these conditions, there are no positive results observed.

Then, the problem of CFP is what is necessary for it to be accepted by current scientific society. There are many negative results by orthodox means and logic showing impossibility of CFP including those by Leggett and Baym, S. Ichimaru, and others. It is, however, necessary to notice that their negative discussion is confined to the problem of d-d fusion in solids. Why they are so narrow-sighted? I don’t understand it. There are many fields around us not explored yet.

“Physics of Neutrons in Solids,” I have proposed in 1993 and been exploring until now, is one of them. The four necessary conditions given above are taken into the theory worked out recently and to be published in Fusion Technology. The key concept of the theory is the “neutron band below zero” originating from excited levels of neutrons in lattice nuclei. This band supplements the “neutron band above zero” worked out using free-neutron approximation several years ago and published in J. Phys. Soc. Japan (1998). Details of the theory about the neutron bands below zero should be consulted papers to be published in FT.

4) Supplement (added after publication of the News No.23);

Comment on the CFRL News No.23 by S. Chubb

Following mail by S. Chubb was transferred from Rich Murray to me. The mail supplements the Report given above in the article on the APS March Meeting and is valuable to reproduce here for benefit of readers.

“Fellow CF colleagues,
I am pleased that Hideo Kozima mentioned the March meeting CF session in his "Cold Fusion RL News No. 23 4.18.1."  I think it is appropriate to mention three additional items, concerning this session that he did not mention:

1.  Each abstract in the session is available, on-line through the WEB address,
http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR01/baps/abs/S7640.html#SV14.001
(None of these abstracts is very long.)

2.  Because the organizers of the March APS meeting have not yet accepted suggestions (which have been made each year, since 1997) that invited talks about Cold Fusion be presented at the meeting, consistent with APS rules, each talk in this session was limited to 10 minutes.  For this reason, at best, each talk could only serve as a brief introduction of the material.

3.  Because members of the APS have not been following CF work, at times, during the session, it was necessary for speakers to provide Introductory material, which though well-known to CF scientists, is not known by most physicists.  (This is one reason that much of the material may have seemed to have been repetitive.)

     Finally, there is an additional piece of news.  In order to draw attention to obvious problems that have resulted from the past history of APS involvement with Cold Fusion, a number of individuals submitted abstracts, associated with the history of Cold Fusion (as opposed to on-going research in the field), for presentation as contributed talks for sessions, organized by the APS forum on the History of Physics.

  The organizers did not allow these talks to be scheduled in any of the sessions associated with this forum.  However, consistent with the by-laws of the APS, the organizers of the meeting (the April APS meeting) where this forum scheduled its sessions were required to accept these talks for presentation.  (They scheduled these talks for a separate session, referred to as "General", that typically is sparsely attended.)

   The talks will be presented in Room 12-13, of the Renaissance Hotel, in Washington, DC, beginning at 3:30 PM, on 30 April 2001.  You may view the abstracts, directly, on-line, through the following WEB site:
http://www.aps.org/meet/APR01/baps/abs/S2380.html#SS13.006

   It is pretty obvious, I think, to anyone who has paid attention to CF history that a serious breakdown in communication about the relevant science has occurred.  How to correct this problem is an open-question.  Hopefully, by openly raising the relevant scientific and political issues in conventional scientific meetings, we will be able to help remedy the situation.

SCOTT CHUBB”