A Possible Mechanism For Cold Fusion

We describe a mechanism for cold fusion that is able to explain how two hydrogen ions may come close enough so as to fusion as well as many of the different and independent experimental observations made during years of experiments. We present the mechanism, its weak points, the way it explains the respective phenomena and suggest some experiments that may validate further the model described by us. The initial work of Fleischman and Pons [1] produced a huge wave of experiments more than twenty years ago. Even if a lot of experiments have been done since then, the acceptance of the facts by the wide scientific community is still to be obtained. This reluctance in acceptance is due to two main reasons: a) the experiments are not yet fully reproducible; b) there is no clear explanation on how two positive ions may get so close, at room temperature, so as to fusion. As regards the argument “a)”, we may affirm that experiments are beginning now to acquire a high degree of reproducibility, se for example the site (www.lenr-canr.org). It remains only the second argument and we will show how such a mechanism may exist and explain this “exotic” phenomenon. In order to do this, we start from several observations: a) from the literature [2], [3] it results that in Pd hydrogen exists in Pd as a positive ion; b) the ions are moving in a periodic electrostatic potential given by the periodic location of the host lattice ions, being a superposition between the potential made by the positively charged metal ions, potential screened by the free electrons of the metal. This last aspect suggests an analogy with the case of electrons in solids [4], [5]. Starting from this point and having in mind also the theory of the Kronig-Penney potential [6] that predicts formation of energy bands in case of periodic potentials, we may conclude that the hydrogen ions exists in such energy bands in the solid. Each type of isotopes has its own energy band structure. We must mention here that a model based on energy band structure for the hydrogen ions was proposed earlier by [7], [8], but this fact was unknown to us when elaborating our model five years ago. However, we follow another route as compared to [7], [8], route that allows us to explain the main aspects of the mechanism and why cold fusion may take place at room temperature. The energy bands may be separated by forbidden energy gaps or may superimpose, as in the case of metals. We refer from now on only to the energy band structure corresponding to hydrogen ions. Following the usual route in solid state physics, we describe the kinetics of the hydrogen ion by its energy E and its wavevector k. There is always a relation E = E(k) between these two parameters, relation that is called the dispersion relation. We may deduce from it another important parameter, the effective mass m of the ion within the lattice: