A RESEARCHER is standing by his controversial claim that bubbles popping in a simple tabletop experiment can produce nuclear fusion, the same process that powers the sun.
Two years ago, Rusi Taleyarkhan and his team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee caused a storm when they announced that they could make hydrogen nuclei fuse by forcing tiny bubbles in acetone to collapse when blasted with sound waves. Critics were quick to point out flaws in the work, especially when other team at Oak Ridge repeated the experiment and failed to find neutrons or tritium, the telltale signs of fusion.
Now Taleyarkhan has revamped the equipment and claims the evidence for fusion is even stronger this time. Although no one has tried repeating the latest work, Oak Ridge says it went through an 鈥渆xtraordinary level of review鈥� before being accepted by Physical Review E.
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Will that be enough to silence the critics? 鈥淚 still don鈥檛 think anyone is going to believe it,鈥� says Larry Crum, an expert in acoustics at the University of Washington in Seattle.