Prescient 1994 Insights From Fleischmann, Pons and Preparata on LENR Theory

By Lewis G. Larsen

To the Editor:

Thank you for your efforts to help communicate the facts about the Widom-Larsen theory of LENRs on the New Energy Times Web site. I wish to remind your readers about a fascinating 1994 paper called “Possible Theories of Cold Fusion” by professors Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Giuliano Preparata. I think that your readers will find this paper to be a fascinating and worthwhile article. It has stood the test of time in many ways.

It was published in Il Nuovo Cimento[1], a formerly well-known physics journal. The journal was a peer-reviewed publication of the Italian Physical Society and was subsequently absorbed into the European Physical Journal family when the European Union was formed.

Before May 2008, we had never encountered this paper in our many Internet searches for citable prior publications on low-energy nuclear reaction research theory. But in May 2008, it suddenly popped up on a search.

Since May 2005, when our preprint of “Ultra Low Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Nuclear Reactions on Metallic Hydride Surfaces” appeared on the Cornell physics arXiv, no one in the LENR field had ever mentioned this 1994 paper to us. Even Fleischmann, with whom I have met and spoken, neglected to mention this paper to me. When I found their paper, I contacted Pons through a third-party. I told him that we had followed the path they had advocated in their paper and Pons responded enthusiastically that we certainly did. On May 12, 2009, I also wrote about our discovery of this paper in an e-mail to the CMNS list.

On reflection, I realized why “cold fusion” promoters had never mentioned this paper and why it had been completely ignored. Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata had advocated a unique approach to LENR theory. But it was not the simplistic two-body D+D –> 4He +heat “cold fusion” paradigm that still haunts the field.

Even though we had been unaware of this 1994 paper and the recommendations within it, their rough conceptual roadmap turned out to be the general route that we eventually followed. Although we were initially perceived as outsiders to the LENR field, we ultimately developed, with rigor, what Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata had hazily sketched out 18 years earlier with their direct as well as indirect references to many-body collective quantum effects, implicit references to surface plasmons and explicit acknowledgement of high local electric fields.

Although Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata did not manage to articulate any of the key underlying details behind the correct theoretical physics, their scientific instincts were conceptually on the right track. We ultimately developed a useful theoretical approach to help scientists understand LENRs. Preparata’s insistence of the importance of quantum electrodynamics was spot-on.

Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata clearly recognized the crucial role that many-body collective effects, in whatever physics might eventually be used, play to successfully explain “cold fusion” phenomena. They reiterated that theme several times in their paper. They even wrote about the potential need to have very high local electric fields on cathode surfaces, a key feature of our theory that some cold fusion advocates have failed to grasp.

In 1994, most researchers in the field still thought that LENRs were a bulk phenomena. Had Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata all realized it was definitely a surface effect, and if they had been able to continue, Preparata may well have beaten us. If fact, they describe surface plasmons without specifically calling them that. Preparata, a theoretical physicist, would have known about surface plasmons and he would have eventually connected the dots.

“The phenomenology of ‘cold fusion,’ must be based on models which take full account of the collective behavior of the proton (deuteron) and electron plasmas,” the authors wrote.

Without knowing it, the authors also described the Born-Oppenheimer breakdown which allows the coupling of surface proton or deuteron oscillations with those of nearby surface plasmon electrons, which in turn, allows the creation of nuclear-strength electric fields which lead to the creation of heavy electrons, which can react directly with electromagnetically coupled protons or deuterons to make neutrons.

“We note also that reactions at metal surfaces could well be described by the macroscopic wave functions which allow for the coupling of the reacting species to the collective modes of the electron plasmas,” the authors wrote.

Fleischmann, Pons, and Preparata were not thinking in terms of an e + p weak reaction, but they certainly had the other pieces right. In the last paragraph of their paper, the authors summarize their thinking.

“The particular mechanisms by which this may happen still await clarification,” the authors wrote. “However, here again, we say that possible explanations of such phenomena must involve collective processes both in the deuteron and d-electron plasmas as, otherwise, the Coulomb barriers would be quite prohibitive.”

That is precisely what we have done with the Widom-Larsen theory of LENRs.
Although their 1994 paper is not terribly specific in many ways, being mostly concerned with broad-brush prescriptions for what they consider to be correct theories of “cold fusion,” many parts of their thought processes were eerily prescient.

Peering into the future, they were able to discern faint, hazy outlines of viable theories that might ultimately emerge from the swirling fog encompassing the research at the time. Looking back, it is easy to see that the field was composed of a bewildering sea of disparate, sometimes conflicting and often inconclusive experimental data. One example is the excess heat observed in light water versus heavy water systems. Another example is the plethora of various nuclear transmutation products reported in light and heavy hydrogen experiments versus the selective reporting of only helium He-4 production in deuterated systems.

Of course, as readers of your work in the Wiley and Elsevier print encyclopedias already know, the history of LENRs did not begin with Pons and Fleischmann’s much maligned press conference at the University of Utah in 1989; the research goes back to at least 1905.

As I have shown, we have uncovered extensive evidence in published, peer-reviewed literature that, in certain types of experiments, scientific knowledge has been episodically observed, dutifully reported, periodically rediscovered, and then unintentionally — or perhaps intentionally — buried for a century. Some examples of this are work with high-current electric discharges in gases; anomalous amounts of nitrogen production in the manufacture of coke; and other heretofore unexplained LENR-related phenomena.

I can only wonder what knowledge may have been lost to science along the way.

Lewis Larsen
Lattice Energy LLC

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[1] Fleischmann, Martin, Pons, Stanley, Preparata, Giuliano, “Possible Theories of Cold Fusion,” Il Nuovo Cimento, Vol. 107A, Issue 1, p. 143-156 (Jan. 1994)