Physics News 579, March 5, 2002

Physics News 579, March 5, 2002: "A team of scientists has claimed evidence for deuterium- deuterium fusion in a tabletop apparatus at Oak Ridge National Lab (Taleyarkhan et al., Science, 8 March 2002), but other scientists (including a separate group at Oak Ridge) are raising serious concerns about the validity of the result. In their experiment, Taleyarkhan et al. (a collaboration of scientists from Oak Ridge, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences) utilize sonoluminescence (SL), itself a well- studied and highly regarded area of research (see, for example, Updates 34, 299, 307, 327, and 355), in which powerful sound waves sent into a liquid tank trigger the creation of single or multiple bubbles which then collapse and release short flashes of light. Sonoluminescence, literally the conversion of sound into light, is a remarkable process in that sound itself is not a densely packed form of energy. Even the sound in the most powerful car stereo has a much lower energy density than the light in a penlight laser beam."