Category:Cold Fusion

This category collects work on cold fusion — nuclear reactions reported at or near room temperature, without the extreme pressures and temperatures that conventional nuclear physics holds to be necessary — together with its later designations LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) and condensed matter nuclear science.

The field dates in its modern form from the announcement by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in March 1989 of excess heat in electrolysis with palladium electrodes in heavy water. The failure of prominent replication attempts within months, and the absence of the neutron flux expected from deuterium fusion, led to the rapid rejection of the claim by mainstream physics and to cold fusion becoming the standard modern example of pathological science.

Work continued nonetheless, and the entries here reflect it: excess-heat calorimetry, transmutation claims, gas-loading and glow-discharge experiments, theoretical proposals for how a lattice might screen the Coulomb barrier, and the argument — pressed by many researchers on this wiki — that the 1989 rejection was premature and institutionally rather than experimentally driven. Related work on energy production outside the accepted framework is under Category:New Energy.