A new Cold Fusion Player: Quantum Potential Corporation

www.Quantum-Potential.com ^ | September 2011 | Dr. Max Fomitchev-Zamilov, Director

[Kevmo]

Here’s another company looking to leverage into LENR.

http://www.quantum-fusion.com/

Technology
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - Background
Low energy nuclear reactions are impossible from the stand point of 'conventional' science. The impossibility lies in the fact that nuclear reactions (such as nuclear fusion) require energies like those found in the center of the sun. Even under immense temperature and pressure found in solar core the probability of hydrogen fusion into helium is so small that one cubic meter of solar matter gives off only a meager few watts of energy. That is why nuclear scientists rightfully scoff at the possibility of low energy nuclear reactions - LENR - as unphysical as there is now known physical mechanism to enable it. Fusing nuclear particles must overcome enormous forces of same-charge repulsion and the only known way of overcoming the repulsion is to accelerate the nuclei in particle accelerators or heat up the gases to millions of degrees (e.g. by means of a thermo-nuclear explosion). Unfortunately, the brute-force approach of recreating solar-core conditions of high pressure and temperature - thermonuclear fusion - is expensive, dangerous and in the moment of writing untenable due to inability of contemporary technology to confine superheated plasmas. Clearly, a different approach to fusion must be thought .

Fleischman and Pons of the University of Utah thought that they have found such an approach when they famously announced their success with room temperature fusion when palladium electrodes were immersed in heavy water. The resulting phenomenon was christened cold fusion and the unusual form and boldness of their announcement deeply rattled scientific community. Unfortunately, clash of egos and interests ensued creating 'cold fusion confusion'. In the end Fleischman and Pons' work suffered from severe reproducibility problem, and their results were discredited. The most shocking outcome of the ongoing controversy was the recommendation by an expert group advising the U.S. government was not to fund cold fusion research despite the evidence of anomalous results .

While cold fusion failed (subsequent private research did not produce any published results) scientific thinking have turned towards the possibility of low energy nuclear reactions. Perhaps it is possible to create locally extreme conditions (such as immense field gradients caused by impurities or topological defects) that can catalize nuclear reactions. Various exotic mechanisms for LENR were proposed in mainstream scientific journals, including slow electron capture by nuclear particles .

While mainstream science remains skeptical of LENR the lack of government / NSF funding in this area makes progress virtually impossible. One problem is that one has to believe in possibility of LENR in order to discover it. The other problem is that we do not necessarily need 'conventional' explanations or 'firm theoretical foundation' to conduct LENR research. Much in physics remains to be discovered, therefore it is strange to require known theoretical mechanisms for unknown natural phenomena .

While neglected by organized research LENR has been embraced by enthusiasts and inventors alike. The most startling success was the invention of fusor by an American inventor and TV pioneer Philo Fransworth. This extremely simple table-top device uses focused electric fields to fuse hydrogen ions into helium nuclei. Operating principle is thermonuclear, but the power output is much smaller than the energy used for generating the electric fields. Still, fusor proves that even a lone inventor can create an operational thermonuclear reactor given enough determination. Now imagine what funded organized research can do for LENR .

Our Approach
We have examined almost all available LENR claims published in all kinds of venues and identified a common line connecting all of them. It seems that rapidly varying strong electric fields are instrumental to LENR. Jefimenko's solution to Maxwell's equations provides a theoretical framework that allows explaining unusually strong forces that may result under such conditions and accelerate the nuclei to energies sufficiently high for fusion. De Broiglie-Bohm theory offers yet another possible explanation. Originally formulated as an ontological interpretation of 'classical' quantum mechanics Bohmian mechanics associates particle's wavefunction with a physical field - quantum potential (which is a concept analogous to ether of Descartes). In derivation of his formulation Bohm spent a great deal of effort eliminating quantum effects on macroscopic level by invoking various plausible 'decoherence' mechanisms. Ironically, few decades after his death the entire branch of physics was dedicated to study of macroscopic quantum condensates - super-cooled liquids or gasses with quantum-mechanical properties. In other words macroscopic quantum objects do exist and Bohm's ideas naturally lead to the conditions necessary for their formation. Perhaps the most startling is the conclusion that if Bohmian quantum potential is in fact a physical field one can expect a constructive interference of this matter waves not only in quantum condensates but also (even if to a lesser extent) in resonant states of matter such as standing waves. Such constructive interference of the quantum potential fields of countless atoms in a liquid or gas may result in locally depressed potential barriers confining protons and neutrons to nuclei and thus reduce the energy barrier of nuclear fusion reactions. We think this is the most plausible mechanism of LENR .

Research & Development Objective
During the past several years we have narrowed the choice of feasible approaches to LENR to just three:
plasma discharges
high electric currents / large gradients of electric field
resonant excitation of turbulent matter combining the effects of all of the above.
We have built prototypes operating on these principles and obtained highly unusual preliminary results such as
anomalous excess heat
anomalous neutron counts
anomalous gamma counts
inexplicable changes in elemental composition
apparent violation of locality (macroscopic quantum entanglement)
Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof we are not holding a press conference just yet. Instead we are focusing on careful verification of the results and solicitation of independent analysis and independent replication of our results .

Our immediate goal is to conduct high-fidelity replication, validation and analysis of results indicative of LENR in the devices we've built. Once our results are confirmed a public statement will be made and commercial applications of LENR will be pursued. Unlike fusor or cold-fusion devices our prototypes operate at much higher power (10,000-100,000 times more powerful than cold fusion cells) thus making the production of useable power possible. We are very excited to work on this technology, which very well may be the most important innovation since alternating current. The Most Important Innovation since Alternating Current

Quantum Potential • State College • Pennsylvania • 814-235-9785 • www.Quantum-Potential.com

[Kevmo]

The Cold Fusion Ping List

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/coldfusion/index?tab=articles

http://www.quantum-fusion.com/technology.shtml

[Kevmo]

The Cold Fusion Ping List

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/coldfusion/index?tab=articles

http://www.quantum-fusion.com/technology.shtml

---

http://www.quantum-fusion.com/people.shtml

People

Dr. Max Fomitchev-Zamilov, Director
Bio · CV · Email

Sergei Godin, R&D Director
CV · Email

Dr. Gary Catchen, Radiation Detection Consultant
Professor of Nuclear Engineering, Pennsylvania State University

Email

Dr. Alexander Karimov, Researcher
Senior research associate, Institute for High Temperatures of Russian Academy of Sciences

The Most Important Innovation since Alternating Current

Quantum Potential · State College · Pennsylvania · 814-235-9785 · www.Quantum-Potential.com

[sinanju]

Hey! All Quantum Potential has to do is cut a few checka to the DCCC and Obama for America, etc. and before you know it, Cold Fusion will be right up there with windmills and solar power.

They just need $535 billion in loan guarantees to make it work.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Hahaha, it’s actually Million with an “M” and not billion with a “B” but you took the post right out of my keyboard.

[Batrachian]

"LENR - as unphysical as there is now known physical mechanism to enable it."

In spite of the typo, and the author having to invent a word to get his point across, this is the only part of the story that means anything. They'd be better of trying to turn lead into gold. That, at least, is possible.

[John Locke]

The de Broglie - Bohm theory is dead. Dead dead dead, The experiments of Hanbury Brown and Twiss decisively refuted it back in the 1950s.

Invest instead in my plan to extract sunlight from cucmbers (5 brownie points for catching the reference).

[blackdog]

Penn State made it's bed with Global Warming cheat sheets.

Thus anything they now present directly or thru their shell company fronts is void junk science for at least a decade. Their researchers are hooked on government funding like Courtney Love is to smack.

[Kevmo]

The de Broglie - Bohm theory is dead. Dead dead dead, The experiments of Hanbury Brown and Twiss decisively refuted it back in the 1950s.
***No mention of Hanbury nor Twiss on Wikipedia. Sounds like they could use an expert like you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohmian_mechanics

This article needs attention from an expert on the subject. See the talk page for details. WikiProject Physics or the Physics Portal may be able to help recruit an expert. (November 2009)

[Kevmo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave

History

In his 1926 paper,[2] Max Born suggested that the wave function of Schrödinger’s wave equation represents the probability density of finding a particle.

From this idea, de Broglie developed the Pilot Wave theory, and worked out a function for the guiding wave. He presented the Pilot Wave theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference.[3] However, Wolfgang Pauli raised an objection to it at the conference, saying that it did not deal properly with the case of inelastic scattering. De Broglie was not able to find a response to this objection, and he and Born abandoned the pilot-wave approach.

Later, in 1932, John von Neumann published a paper claiming to prove that all hidden variable theories were impossible.[4] (A result found to be flawed by Grete Hermann three years later, though this went unnoticed by the physics community for over fifty years).

One would expect that, after such a bad start, this theory would disappear without trace. However, in 1952, David Bohm became dissatisfied with the prevailing orthodoxy, and rediscovered de Broglie’s Pilot Wave theory. Bohm developed the Pilot Wave Theory into what is now called the De Broglie-Bohm theory.[5]

The de Broglie-Bohm theory itself might have gone unnoticed by most physicists, if it had not been championed by John Bell, who also countered the objections to it. In 1987, John Bell[6] rediscovered Grete Hermann’s work, and thus showed the physics community that Pauli’s and von Neumann’s objections really only showed that the Pilot Wave theory did not have locality; in fact, no quantum-mechanical theories have locality, so these objections did not invalidate the Pilot Wave theory.

The de Broglie-Bohm theory is now considered by some to be a valid challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but it remains controversial.

Yves Couder and co-workers recently discovered a macroscopic pilot wave system in the form of walking droplets. This system exhibits behaviour of a pilot wave, heretofore considered to be reserved to microscopic phenomena.[7]

[Kevmo]

for something that's "dead dead dead dead", it sure seems to be getting up and walking around pretty good.
A quantum take on certainty
Physicists show that in the iconic double-slit experiment, uncertainty can be eased .
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110602/full/news.2011.344.html
Edwin Cartlidge
The double-slit experiment shows the dual wave-particle nature of photons.GIPHOTOSTOCK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
An international group of physicists has found a way of measuring both the position and the momentum of photons passing through the double-slit experiment, upending the idea that it is impossible to measure both properties in the lab at the same time .

In the classic double-slit experiment, first done more than 200 years ago, light waves passing through two parallel slits create a characteristic pattern of light and dark patches on a screen positioned behind the slits. The patches correspond to the points on the screen where the peaks and troughs of the waves diffracting out from the two slits combine with one another either constructively or destructively .

In the early twentieth century, physicists showed that this interference pattern was evident even when the intensity of the light was so low that photons pass through the apparatus one at a time. In other words, individual photons seem to interfere with themselves, so light exhibits both particle-like and wave-like properties.
However, placing detectors at the slits to determine which one a particle is passing through destroys the interference pattern on the screen behind. This is a manifestation of Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that it is not possible to precisely measure both the position (which of the two slits has been traversed) and the momentum (represented by the interference pattern) of a photon .

What quantum physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues have now shown, however, is that it is possible to precisely measure photons' position and obtain approximate information about their momentum1, in an approach known as 'weak measurement' .

Steinberg's group sent photons one by one through a double slit by using a beam splitter and two lengths of fibre-optic cable. Then they used an electronic detector to measure the positions of photons at some distance away from the slits, and a calcite crystal in front of the detector to change the polarization of the photon, and allow them to make a very rough estimate of each photon's momentum from that change.
Average trajectory
By measuring the momentum of many photons, the researchers were able to work out the average momentum of the photons at each position on the detector. They then repeated the process at progressively greater distances from the slits, and so by "connecting the dots" were able to trace out the average trajectories of the photons. They did this while still recording an interference pattern at each detector position .

Intriguingly, the trajectories closely match those predicted by an unconventional interpretation of quantum mechanics known as pilot-wave theory, in which each particle has a well-defined trajectory that takes it through one slit while the associated wave passes through both slits. The traditional interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, dismisses the notion of trajectories, and maintains that it is meaningless to ask what value a variable, such as momentum, has if that's not what is being measured.
Steinberg stresses that his group's work does not challenge the uncertainty principle, pointing out that the results could, in principle, be predicted with standard quantum mechanics. But, he says, "it is not necessary to interpret the uncertainty principle as rigidly as we are often taught to do", arguing that other interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the pilot-wave theory, might "help us to think in new ways" .

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David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, UK, is not convinced that the experiment has told us anything new about how the universe works. He says that although "it's quite cool to see strange predictions verified", the results could have been obtained simply by "calculating them using a computer and the equations of quantum mechanics" .

"Experiments are only relevant in science when they are crucial tests between at least two good explanatory theories," Deutsch says. "Here, there was only one, namely that the equations of quantum mechanics really do describe reality."
But Steinberg thinks his work could have practical applications. He believes it could help to improve logic gates for quantum computers, by allowing the gates to repeat an operation deemed to have failed previously. "Under the normal interpretation of quantum mechanics we can't pose the question of what happened at an earlier time," he says. "We need something like weak measurement to even pose this question."

[aruanan]

The most shocking outcome of the ongoing controversy was the recommendation by an expert group advising the U.S. government was not to fund cold fusion research despite the evidence of anomalous results .

However, by about 2002 or 2003 I know for a fact that a U.S. government group studying the results of experiments in LENR around the world recommended, based on those results, that the U.S. government allocate funds for further exploration and development of the phenomenon. I know this because I talked with a representative of that office who was at a job recruitment fair at the University of Chicago. In the course of our conversation about the kind of folks they were seeking for his particular organization--while waiting for a friend of mine to fill out an application for the CIA--he mentioned this as one of the things they were involved with.

[airborne]

I confess thay I had to look it up.

And even though there is a Belgian band (MekanOrganiK) that has an album named "How to extract sunlight from Cucumbers" -

I believe your reference has to do with the novel "Gulliver's Travels".

[bunkerhill7]

fusion razor in ice cube = cold fusion

[Jonty30]

To Obama, it’s all monopoly money anyway.

[John Locke]

I'm with David Deutsch on this one. The two-slit experiment has nothing to do with the Heisenberg Uncertainty; it's about photon self interference. We know that position and momentum can both be measured at separate times and places, but "connecting the dots" relies on the assumption of Contrafactual Definiteness, (CFD), which is itself in dispute.

Back to Hanbury Brown and Twiss (that's 2 people, one with a double name). Here is a simple analogy, not I hope over simple. Two pitchers each throw one quantum baseball, one blue and one yellow. Two catchers each catch one baseball. You cannot detect the baseballs in flight, but we can assume that they in fact have a definite trajectory, as CFD implies and as the "pilot wave" theory asserts.

Wrong. After the experiment, each catcher is holding a green baseball. In other words, each of them caught half a baseball from pitcher 1, and half a baseball from pitcher 2. The baseballs indeed have no individual existence in flight, and are quantized into whole baseballs only by the boundary conditions.

[Hanbury Brown & Twiss, Nature vol 178 pp 1046-1048] is the root node; Science Citation Index should retrieve the subsequent history.

[from occupied ga]

NSF funding in this area makes progress virtually impossible

When even the NSF isn't stupid enough to throw taxpayer dollars at it, it must be really bad,

[samtheman]

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift's satirical treatment of contemporary science, particularly as focused in the section dealing with the Grand Academy of Lagado, reached great new heights. (On one day in 1710, Swift visited Gresham College, the Tower, a puppet show and Bedlam. How his imagination must have responded …)

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. (III.v)

--Extracting sunlight

[Kevmo]

So, HB and Twiss are working an analogy while these scientists are working with observation?

From the article: “Intriguingly, the trajectories closely match those predicted by an unconventional interpretation of quantum mechanics known as pilot-wave theory, in which each particle has a well-defined trajectory that takes it through one slit while the associated wave passes through both slits.”

[John Locke]

I apologise for an unclear post. No, HB and T did the experiment, with photons of course not baseballs, and the result is essentially as I described. The analogy was mine.

If I'm still not making myself clear, please read the original paper.