Cold Fusion Race: NASA, MIT, DARPA and CERN

Four months ago, Andrea Rossi demonstrated what he claims was a one-megawatt "Energy Catalyser" -- or E-Cat -- which produces power by cold fusion. This technology, also known as Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), had been consigned to the deepest cellar of fringe science.

Now it's hammering on the cellar door, and Nasa, MIT, Darpa and Cern are among those peering through the keyhole, wondering if it should be allowed back in with respectable science. As part of Wired.co.uk's continued coverage of progress in this controversial field, we have investigated recent developments.

Nasa

Nasa has started giving very mixed signals on cold fusion. After years of silence on the issue, a piece appeared on its website stating that LENR tests carried out at Nasa's Glenn Research Centre "consistently show evidence of anomalous heat," indicating that cold fusion was taking place. There is also a link to a paper given at an LENR Workshop held at Glenn in September 2011. However, when questioned, a Nasa spokesman stated out that there was no Nasa cold fusion project, and no budget for it. The work appears to be carried out on the side by interested Nasa scientists.

Even more dramatically, on 16 January a video appeared on Nasa's Technology Gateway site, essentially a marketplace for commercialising technology developed at Nasa. This featured Dr Joseph Zawodny talking about his "Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate & Sustain LENR." In this Dr Zawodny says the technology has the potential to provide home heating and electricity, cleanly and without nuclear waste.

The video release was quickly followed by a long post on Dr Zawodny's blog explaining that he was expressing his own views on LENR and not those of Nasa. In response to the clamour from Rossi's fans, he stressed that he was not yet convinced the E-Cat works: "I am unaware of any clear and convincing demonstrations of any viable commercial device producing useful amounts of net energy."

Steven Krivit of New Energy Times used the Freedom of Information Act to get details of more Nasa LENR presentations and clearly there's quite a fan club there.

Cern

Meanwhile Cern is holding a colloquium on LENR, scheduled for 22 March. This will be available live via webcast, and will be given by Francesco Celani from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Cern is of course a major bastion of mainstream science; a search of Cern's site shows just eight papers on cold fusion compared to over 8,000 on conventional hot fusion. The colloquium seems like inviting a heretic to preach in a cathedral. A recent presentation shows that Celani is a strong advocate for LENR, suggesting that the challenge now is understanding exactly how it works. (He also states that Rossi's claims, though not impossible, need independent verification)

MIT

MIT, which played a key role in discrediting the original cold fusion studies in 1989, might also be shifting its position a little. This January for the first time there was a short course called "Cold Fusion 101." This was taught by Peter Hagelstein, who has been working on LENR for many years. According to a report in Cold Fusion Times, the course included a working demonstration of LENR showing measurable excess of heat.

Darpa

Darpa, the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been quietly pursuing LENR for some years. Its budget plans for next year, released earlier this month, listed some significant achievements: "Continued quantification of material parameters that control degree of increase in excess heat generation and life expectancy of power cells in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy. Established ability to extend active heat generation time from minutes to 2.5 days for pressure-activated power cells."

However, when contacted Darpa were unable to comment on this work.

But what of Andrea Rossi and Defkalion?

Andrea Rossi

In the meantime, Andrea Rossi has been playing the tightrope walker, always appearing to be a whisker from tumbling into the abyss. The University of Bologna terminated an agreement to explore the E-Cat after he failed to make a progress payment; but a later statement indicated it was still keen to work with him.

As New Energy Times noted, the original one-megawatt device which was supposedly sold to a mystery customer months ago has not moved. When he has free heating, why is his Bologna factory so cold that Rossi needs an overcoat in one video? Rossi responded in terms of the size of the space and the available E-Cats.

More digging by New Energy Times suggested that Rossi was not in fact working in partnership with National Instruments as he has claimed. However, a later statement by the company confirmed that Rossi's account was substantially correct, even if he was not an actual customer.

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If Rossi has not produced anything tangible in the last few months, he has certainly come up with plenty of vapourware. The entire E-Cat design has been revamped and upgraded. Instead of costing thousands, the price of a ten-kilowatt domestic E-Cat will now be between 500-700 Euros. It will be the size of a desktop PC and able to directly replace existing boilers, and will be refuelled by changing a simple cartridge every six months. In a year or two's time, Rossi says it will also be possible to generate electricity from an E-Cat.

Rossi claims that almost 100,000 people have signed up to express interest in ordering an E-Cat: "You will be put in the waiting list and in Autumn you will receive a precise offer: at that point you will be free to cancel the order or confirm it. The deliveries could start within one year (could, not will)."

Rossi also claims that he will have a completely robotised production line which will churn out a million E-Cats in the first year alone. However, the very existence of the factory remains unproven, along with his mystery customer, mystery business partners, mystery suppliers and the mystery investors who now apparently control his company, Leonardo Corp.

Perhaps Rossi's "precise offer" might ask customers to make a deposit. It would take a very trusting soul to hand over cash without the sort of evidence that Zawodny and Celani seek.

Defkalion Green

While Rossi has declined to give any further public or scientific demonstrations, saying that he wants to leave it to the market, his rival Defkalion Green technologies has seemingly taken a much bolder approach. It has invited independent testers to carry out trials on its Hyperion LENR reactor.

We know that seven independent test groups will be involved, but there things get a bit murky. Non-disclosure agreements are in place, and it is not certain what information will be released or when: if the Very Big Oil Corporation finds the Hyperion works, it might prefer to talk to Defkalion itself rather than publicising it. (And big oil might just be interested -- the indefatigable Steven Krivit found that Royal Dutch Shell has started looking for opportunities to work with LENR experts.)

What we do know is that according to the test protocol, one live and one inert Hyperion will be tested side by side for 48 hours, with the inert machine acting as a control. Then the active component will be removed from the live and placed in the inert one, and the test will be run again, so the complete test will take a minimum of four days.

Defkalion has confirmed that the tests will start on 24 February. According to Sterling Allan of Peswiki, who visited Defkalion a couple of weeks ago, the first round of tests will be carried out by a Greek government organisation. Defkalion has not released anything about the identity of the testers.

So perhaps the Greek government will soon announce a fantastic new energy source, one that will solve the country's economic problems at a stroke and provide the world with unlimited cheap energy. No doubt they would love to do that… and the rest of us will also await test results with interest.

A Higgs Boson Announcement be Imminent from the LHC?

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider could be getting an early Christmas present: the Higgs boson. According to the latest rumours, scientists at the LHC are seeing a signal that could correspond to a Higgs particle with a mass of 125 GeV (a proton is slightly less than 1 GeV).

Public talks are scheduled to discuss the latest results from Atlas and CMS, two of the main LHC experiments, on 13 December. This follows one day after a closed-door Cern council meeting where officials will get a short preview of the findings, whatever they may be.

"Chances are high (but not strictly 100%) that the talks will either announce a (de facto or de iure) discovery or some far-reaching exclusion that will be really qualitative and unexpected," wrote theoretical physicist Lubos Motl on his blog.

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...........................................................................................................................................................Motl also mentioned that an internal email sent to the Cern community suggests that results on the elusive Higgs -- which is required under the Standard Model of particle physics to provide mass to different particles -- will be inconclusive. This could mean that the finding is below the five-sigma threshold needed to definitively declare a discovery in physics.

But if the rumours are true, and the Higgs has been seen at 125 GeV, it could bolster the idea that there is physics beyond the Standard Model that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. A 125 GeV Higgs is lighter than predicted under the simplest models and would likely require more complex theories, such as supersymmetry, which posits the existence of a heavier partner to all known particles.

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Neutrino Experiment Repeat at Cern Finds Same Result

The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result.

If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.

Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test.

The new work used much shorter bunches.

It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

The experiments have been carried out by the Opera collaboration - short for Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus.

It hinges on sending bunches of neutrinos created at the Cern facility (actually produced as decays within a long bunch of protons produced at Cern) through 730km (454 miles) of rock to a giant detector at the INFN-Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.

The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance.

The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum forms a cornerstone in physics - first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell and later incorporated into Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Timing is everything   Initial analysis of the work by the wider scientific community argued that the relatively long-lasting bunches of neutrinos could introduce a significant error into the measurement. Those bunches lasted 10 millionths of a second - 160 times longer than the discrepancy the team initially reported in the neutrinos' travel time. To address that, scientists at Cern adjusted the way in which the proton beams were produced, resulting in bunches just three billionths of a second long. When the Opera team ran the improved experiment 20 times, they found almost exactly the same result.

"This is reinforcing the previous finding and ruling out some possible systematic errors which could have in principle been affecting it," said Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We didn't think they were, and now we have the proof," he told BBC News. "This is reassuring that it's not the end of the story."

The first announcement of evidently faster-than-light neutrinos caused a stir worldwide; the Opera collaboration is very aware of its implications if eventually proved correct.

The error in the length of the bunches, however, is just the largest among several potential sources of uncertainty in the measurement, which must all now be addressed in turn; these mostly centre on the precise departure and arrival times of the bunches.

"So far no arguments have been put forward that rule out our effect," Dr Ereditato said. "This additional test we made is confirming our original finding, but still we have to be very prudent, still we have to look forward to independent confirmation. But this is a positive result." That confirmation may be much longer in coming, as only a few facilities worldwide have the detectors needed to catch the notoriously flighty neutrinos - which interact with matter so rarely as to have earned the nickname "ghost particles". Next year, teams working on two other experiments at Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results. The US Minos experiment and Japan's T2K experiment will also test the observations. It is likely to be several months before they report back. Read more Environment Clean Generations Popsci

A Possible Victory for Einstein

So it turns out that Einstein may not have been wrong about the universal speed limit. Not only is special relativity safe, it provides an explanation for those faster-than-light neutrinos. They’re not breaking the light-speed barrier; they just appear to be, thanks to the relativistic motion of the clocks checking their speed.

As we all remember, a few weeks ago some scientists at CERN set the physics world on fire when they shared data showing neutrinos were moving faster than light. Specifically, they were showing up at a distant neutrino detector about 60 nanoseconds faster than the time in which light would make the same trip. But the rules of physics said this could not be. 

The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus team (which was not looking for this result, by the way) calibrated their clocks, measured their distances and crunched their numbers in search of an explanation. 

Flummoxed, they dumped their findings on the larger physics community, which proceeded to eviscerate the experiment. In the three weeks since, almost 100 papers have shown up on the preprint server arXiv trying to make sense of it all. Physicists have blamed everything from poor geodesy to ill-timed clocks, and other particle physics observatories are hard at work trying to replicate the results.

Now a Dutch physicist says it’s really very simple — the OPERA team overlooked the relativistic motion of their clocks. Technology Review's arXiv blog highlights the paper here.

OPERA was studying neutrino oscillation, in which these ghostly particles switch from one type to another. They were firing off muon neutrinos from a neutrino beam at CERN and sending them to Gran Sasso, Italy, where researchers counted how many of them had become tau neutrinos. Along with careful Earth-measuring, this experiment required super-precise synchronization of clocks at the two locations. The team did this with GPS satellites, which broadcast a time signal as they orbit about 12,500 miles above the Earth. The OPERA team had to calculate how long it takes for one of these time signals to reach the Earth. But they did not account for the clocks’ relativistic motion, according to physicist Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

The radio signals travel from the satellites at light speed, which has nothing to do with the satellites’ speed. This is one of the central tenets of special relativity: “Light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body,” as Einstein put it himself.

But because the satellites are moving, from their point of view, the positions of the neutrinos and the detector are changing. The neutrinos are moving toward the detector, and the detector appears to be moving toward the neutrino source. So the distance between the origin and destination appears to be shorter than it would if it were being observed on the ground.

“Consequently, in this reference frame the distance traveled by the [particles] is shorter than the distance separating the source and detector,” van Elburg writes. This phenomenon is overlooked because the OPERA team thinks of the clocks as on the ground — which they are, physically — and not in orbit, which is where their synchronizing reference point is located.

Using the altitude, orbital period, inclination to the equator and other metrics, van Elburg calculates the error rate: “The observed time-of-flight should be about 32 ns shorter than the time-of-flight using a baseline bound clock,” he writes. This is done at both clock locations, so double that, and you get an early-arrival time of 64 nanoseconds. That pretty much accounts for the OPERA anomaly. 

“This paper shows that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) happens to be less universal than the name suggests, and that we have to take in to account how our clocks are moving,” van Elburg writes.

Of course, his paper has not yet been published, and is subject to the same scrutiny and peer review as the OPERA folks, so we can’t accept van Elburg’s theory just yet. But it’s certainly a handy explanation. And it’s a lovely piece of irony, too — not only was Einstein’s special theory of relativity right all along, it even provides a reason why.

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Particles Faster Than Speed Of Light At CERN

Enormous underground detectors are needed to catch neutrinos, that are so elusive as to be dubbed "ghost particles".

A meeting at Cern, the world's largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light. 

The team presented its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.

If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.

Antonio Ereditato added "words of caution" to his Cern presentation because of the "potentially great impact on physics" of the result.

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."

Friday's meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.

"Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects," Dr Ereditato told the meeting.

"We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments."

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second earlier than they would have done if they had travelled at the speed of light.

This is a tiny fractional change - just 20 parts in a million - but one that occurs consistently.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 16,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery. 

But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit.

That has motivated them to publish their measurements.

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato told BBC News.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

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CERN, Cosmic Rays and Climate Change

Not content with just stirring the pot in particle physics, CERN has embarked on an experiment aimed at addressing whether or not comic rays from deep space might be seeding clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, influencing climate change. The early findings are far from deciding the issue of whether climate change is man made or otherwise, but they have borne some interesting results. It turns out that cosmic rays could be influencing temperatures on Earth. Perhaps even more groundbreaking, it turns out they also might not. Welcome to climate science.

The notion is this: Cosmic rays that we know are bombarding our planet from the far reaches of space are pelting the atmosphere with protons, and those protons can ionize some compounds that in turn condense into aerosols, basically droplets in the atmosphere. Clouds might in turn build around those droplets, and those clouds shield the Earth, reducing temperatures.

But our dosing of cosmic rays is dependent on the sun. When the sun is emitting lots of radiation during high points in the solar cycle, its magnetic field shields us from some of those cosmic rays. An active sun spells fewer rays spells fewer clouds, and hence warming temperatures on Earth.

So, are cosmic rays (or the lack thereof) to blame for our current spate of rising temperatures? Of course/not/maybe.

The experiment at CERN is fabricating the upper atmosphere in the lab by trapping ultra-pure air and things like water vapor, ozone, ammonia, and sulphur dioxide in a chamber. They are then bombarding that air with protons from the same generator that supplies the Large Hadron Collider. Preliminary results show that these faux cosmic rays indeed have an effect on the atmosphere: When high energy protons stream in, production of nanometer-sized particles in the atmosphere increases by more than ten times.

Case closed. But not really. Those particles that are forming are far too small to actually seed a cloud. So while CERN has proven that cosmic rays are definitely influencing the upper atmosphere, the connection between warming and cosmic rays is far from firmly established.

Naturally, different scientists are reaching different conclusions, but all seem to think this experiment is a worthwhile idea, even if it basically asks more questions than it answers. So, just to recap, the whole climate change argument has not been put to rest. 

 by "environment clean generations"