New Purdue Panel Faults Bubble Fusion Pioneer

摘要

The third time was no charm for Rusi Taleyarkhan, the "bubble fusion" pioneer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. After two previous investigations looked into alleged scientific misconduct by Taleyarkhan, a third panel has now cited Taleyarkhan for two cases of misconduct. Both cases centered on efforts by Taleyarkhan to make experiments carried out by members of his lab appear as independent verification of his previous work. Taleyarkhan first sparked controversy after he and colleagues reported in Science in 2002 that they had generated nuclear fusion with a simple tabletop setup. Fusion, the process that powers the sun, normally takes place at pressures and temperatures intense enough to cause atomic nuclei to combine and give off energy in the process. Decades' worth of efforts to harvest energy from that process in reactors on Earth have failed. In their original Science paper, Taleyarkhan, who was then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and his colleagues reported that firing a pulse of ultrasound and neutrons at a cylinder of acetone in which the hydrogen atoms had been replaced by deuterium atoms caused bubbles to form, swell, and collapse. The heat and pressure at the center of the collapsing bubbles reportedly fused deuteriums together, liberating nuclear byproducts and excess energy.