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Yesterday, New Energy Times reported that Wellesley Hills, Mass., low-energy nuclear reactions researcher Mitchell Swartz made a misleading claim on his personal Web site.

“This JET Energy NANOR(TM) demonstrated a significant energy gain greater than 10,” Swartz wrote.

New Energy Times had received a tip from a LENR researcher that the gain was 18 milliwatts.

Today, another LENR researcher provided us with Swartz’s data. The first researcher was off, but not by much. It was 80 milliwatts, not 18.

When Swartz published his claim on his Web site, he failed to tell readers – many of whom are new to LENR – that his claim was in milliwatts. This was a crucial omission because, for the past year, most of the news in LENR has been dominated by the extraordinary claims of “Energy Catalyzer” inventor Andrea Rossi, who has made claims in megawatts.

Less significant, but still important, was that Swartz failed to tell readers that the excess-heat period ran for only three minutes.

Swartz’s results are no different from thousands of other LENR experiments in the last 23 years. A LENR researcher who requested anonymity was surprised that Swartz would report this as a significant result.

“There are three graphs,” the researcher wrote. “The third one is the only understandable one. Swartz’s demonstration was showing an efficiency of 10, which sounds good, but his peak power output is only 80 milliwatts! That’s right: MILLIWATTS!

“In 23 years, he has yet to sustain anything more than 1 watt. There is little in Swartz’s work to get excited about.”

The second researcher, who provided Swartz’s slides today, wrote this comment to me in an e-mail:

“When you look at the data, you can see, barely, a 1 degree C temperature rise for about three minutes, using about 12 mW of input power to produce less than 100 milliwatts of heat. This is not a breakthrough.”

(Click here for larger image)

Swartz bypassed scientific protocol when he announced his claim on his Web site. Had he followed proper scientific communication protocol, as most LENR researchers do, he would have been required to provide at least the following:

1. Maximum excess-heat power level.
2. Percent of excess heat relative to input power.
3. Duration of excess-heat period or excess energy.

A good example of well-described excess heat results is SRI International electrochemist Michael McKubre’s graph on page 227 of the American Chemical Society “Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook.”

Table Courtesy M. McKubre. Source: McKubre, M.C.H., Tanzella, F.L., Dardik, I., El Boher, A., Zilov, T., Greenspan, E., Sibilia, C. and Violante, V., “Replication of Condensed Matter Heat Production,” Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, Marwan, Jan, and Krivit, Steven B., eds., American Chemical Society/Oxford University Press, Washington, D.C.,ISBN 978-0-8412-6966-8, August 2008

In 2010, New Energy Times began an investigation into SRI International electrochemist Michael McKubre’s experiment “M4.” In the preceding decade, McKubre had presented this experiment as the best proof for “cold fusion.”

In our investigation, we found that McKubre gradually changed, added and deleted data points and values in “M4.” McKubre made all these changes without scientific explanation, most without notification.

McKubre is one of the most qualified electrochemists who has worked in the field of low-energy nuclear reactions. He and his former group set the standard in the 1990s for precision measurement of excess heat in LENR experiments. They designed first-principles calorimeters and performed meticulous, temporally correlated measurements of helium production in LENR cells.

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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)