Background
Taleyarkhan was born in 1953 near Mumbai, India. Based on his academic excellence, he was awarded a scholarship from the prestigious Tata organization in India and earned his first degree, in mechanical engineering, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India. At 24, he moved to the United States and earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and science, a master’s degree in business, and a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Rusi Taleyarkhan (Photo: S.B. Krivit)

He worked at several commercial laboratories, and as soon as he was eligible, in 1988, Taleyarkhan became a U.S. citizen and went to work at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2003, he was recruited to become a nuclear engineering professor at Purdue University.

While at Oak Ridge, Taleyarkhan was given a high-level security clearance from the Department of Energy and worked with technologies for national security and defense, nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics, and safety technology.

He has held several positions of leadership in the American Nuclear Society, has been a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, is a founding director and member of the national Acoustic Fusion Technology Consortium, and is a founding member and faculty advisor at Purdue University’s Energy Center.

Basic Concepts
The science of nuclear cavitation is based on several related concepts. The first is a phenomenon known as cavitation. It was first observed in 1917 by the British navy, and it is generally, but not completely, understood. The navy observed damage to a ship’s propellers coincident with the occurrence of tiny bubbles in the water. Physicist Lord Raleigh was the first to begin investigations.

Encyclopedia Britannica defines cavitation as “the formation of vapor bubbles within a liquid at low-pressure regions that occur in places where the liquid has been accelerated to high velocities.”

The second concept is sonoluminescence, which derives its name from the effect of transforming sound waves into light. Sonoluminescence is not fully understood, either. In the 1930s, two German physicists, H. Frenzel and H. Schultes, made the connection between cavitation and sonoluminescence, using acoustic waves to trigger the cavitation. Continue reading »

Failures to Replicate
One of the novel aspects of the approach used by the Taleyarkhan group was using multi-bubble sonoluminescence rather than single-bubble sonoluminescence, which Putterman had been trying. Among other novel ideas, the multi-bubble approach led to the new evidence by the Taleyarkhan group.

On Oct. 22, 2004, just days after Putterman ran his replication attempt, which failed to duplicate Taleyarkhan’s results, and Putterman posed gleefully with his students for the BBC camera crew, Bertodano sent an e-mail to Tsoukalas and his group at Purdue about the Tsoukalas group’s experiments. Bertodano wrote to Tsoukalas and told him that some of the members of their group had just met and that they had objections to their own confirmatory data, obtained a year earlier.

Sometime in October or November, Putterman pitched an idea to DARPA to attempt a replication of the Taleyarkhan group’s experiment. It was the same type of experiment he had just performed for the BBC — though he almost certainly did not tell DARPA about his failure to replicate — and the BBC had not broadcast Putterman’s failure to replicate.

Back at Purdue, on Dec. 6, 2004, Joshua Walter sent a revision of the Tsoukalas group’s draft paper for NURETH-11 to members of the group. The confirmatory data had been removed. Xu began to write his own paper for NURETH-11.

On Dec. 8, 2004, Tony Tether, the head of DARPA, approved Putterman’s idea of an attempted replication, and DARPA asked for formal proposals. An e-mail from someone at DARPA (the name has been redacted) or the Office of Naval Research spoke highly of Putterman. Continue reading »

New Tribunal
Tsoukalas began to cooperate with Reich and to further distance himself from the research. On Feb. 7, 2006, Tsoukalas began to fix the discrepancy between what he had told Reich and what Butt had told her. Tsoukalas formed an unauthorized tribunal that he called a Fact-Finding Committee, whose purpose was to investigate not Taleyarkhan but Xu, Butt and Revankar. The committee also fixed the discrepancy.

The three-member committee, operating in violation of the university’s policy for research integrity, obtained an unsigned document from Butt in which he denied having anything to do with the research. Xu, who did not understand his rights, appeared before the tribunal. Revankar was familiar with the Purdue policy on research integrity and, because of this, and despite significant pressure from the committee, refused to appear before it.

On Feb. 9, 2009, Putterman wrote to Suslick, “I was contacted by a Eugenie Reich, freelance for Nature. Her goal is to write a news story that will cause an investigation of Rusi Taleyarkhan.”

The e-mail is retyped here for clarity:

Ken, I was contacted by a Eugenie Reich freelance for Nature.
Her goal is to write a newstory that will cause an investigation of RT.
We need to have a position in this matter before it spins out of control.
Best would be if Lefteri announced an investigation.
She keeps asking me why hasn’t Lefteri initiated an investigation?
I say ask him. She asks me if I believe the data and I say it’s wrong. So she says why don’t you accuse him of fraud?
Of course I say it’s a long way from bad science to fraud. This will get its own life unless Lefteri acts.
I am overarching PI but I am unable to act [be]cause RT didn’t acknowledge DARPA [The PRL paper was funded by DoE, not DARPA.].
Feel free to pass on to Lefteri.
This is just a stream of concern.

Seth

According to a Feb. 9, 2006, e-mail from Reich, Tsoukalas had suggested to her the possibility of science fraud by Taleyarkhan. According to additional FOIA-obtained e-mails, Tsoukalas then talked things over with Putterman and Suslick. Afterward, Tsoukalas wrote back to Reich and attempted to retract his accusations of fraud. He characterized his comments as merely “poetic license and dramatic language” and told Reich that he did not have evidence of fraud. Tsoukalas also asked her to treat his previous on-the-record comments as confidential.

The e-mail trail does not indicate that she agreed to accommodate Tsoukalas’ request, and Reich showed no signs of backing off the story she thought she had. Continue reading »