Fusion In Sonoluminescence (Again)? 417
srhuston writes "According to a story at the NY Times (first born child req'd, yadda yadda), 'Scientists are again claiming they have made a Sun in a jar, offering perhaps a revolutionary energy source, and this time even some skeptics find the evidence intriguing enough to call for a closer look.' This has been covered here before (First, second, third) but it looks like they claim that the latest round of experiments, using better detectors, 'offer more convincing data that the phenomenon is real'." The scientists involved come from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Russian Academy of Science; here's their press release.
Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Energy (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is right, it's great news. A new method of plasma containment (or usage thereof) is always good, if not for this project than others.
Re:Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Energy (Score:5, Informative)
If you mean "fusion in general", I'll accept that.
If you only mean to refer to sonoluminescence, then no, you do not nead large and expensive industrial equipment - You can do it in your basement with roughly $100 in equipment (though having a low-end oscilliscope helps, you don't absolutely need it, you could get away with a simple analog meter).
Check out the Single Bubble Sonoluminescence HOWTO [physik3.gwdg.de] for a nice, detailed example of a functional experimental setup.
Not exactly rocked science - As the basic idea, you make a flask of degassed water resonate at roughly 25khz. Insert a tiny air bubble, and bingo, with a bit of trial and error, you have sonoluminescence.
Of course, I agree that getting energy out of such a system may take some doing, but as a proof of concept (and just a really cool experiment in general), any advanced-amateur EE geek would already have all the parts they need.
Re:Energy (Score:5, Funny)
In a darkened room,
Re:Energy (Score:4, Interesting)
Never heard about this so I thought you were making some sort of joke. So looked it up on google and even found some pictures [towson.edu] of the effect.
Now where would I buy these lifesavers in Europe?
no that's triboluminescence.... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if the humor was intended or not, so excuse my humor detector if so...
Re:Energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, they solved that problem in the 50's. [bikiniatoll.com] It's controlling that reaction that is rather more difficult...
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
It was fusion...
Is the Ulam-Teller "gadget" fusion? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course that doesn't do too much. So you put a plutoni
Re:Energy (Score:5, Funny)
If you had meant us to read very large as industrial, why didn't you just write industrial?
Just curious (read: baffled (read: confused) by this common (read: prevelant on slashdot (read: idiot funhouse)) idiom (read (read: interpet and understand writing): little bit of stupidity (read: you)).
Re:Energy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Energy (Score:4, Funny)
Without that, they usually don't work very well.
Re:Energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Energy (Score:4, Informative)
In bouncing around, they radiate a certain amount of energy incidentally as electromagnetics. This is called "black body" radiation, and is why hot metal glows red, and when hotter, yellow/blue. Colder metal, near room temperature, still glows-- in the infrared.
Lots of things at fairly "normal" temperatures (around 20C) have resonant frequencies of molecular bonds in the infrared and thus radiate in infrared. This is why you can use infrared to determine how hot something is, but the infrared is not the heat energy of the substance itself.
One of the big problems with fusion being energy-positive in a practical reactor is so much of the output energy is emitted on really high frequencies and exotic energy forms (x-rays, alpha/beta radiation, etc) because of the energy levels involved. These are difficult to turn back into useful energy to do work and keep the reactor running.
Re:Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps not in this case, but that is not generally the correct litmus test for the viability of a power source.
Portability matters. Batteries are horribly inefficient, yet they seem to keep me from stumbling around in the woods at night quite nicely. Similarly, the photovoltaics on a satellite, or on a water pump in rural Bangledesh, may take far more power to create than they will ever produce, and yet they are useful because we can't run an extension cord up to geosynchronous orbit, or run power lines for hundreds of miles through sparsely populated territories, (especially where the scrap metal value of the powerlines exceeds the yearly income potential of the local population, but that's an economic issue, not a matter of physics).
Now, given the comparative simplicity of the current prototypes, it's probably safe to say that the power input required to create the device is not a limiting factor. However, for arguments sake, let's say that a working design which sustains the reaction may well require a more precise fusion chamber, made of specific materials machined to tight tolerances, and perhaps involving active electronic control. All of these involve great expenditures of energy, to mine the materials, refine them, and produce the finished product. Could it be used to power our cities? Of course not. And yet, that product could still be the most efficient (well-to-wheel, so to speak) portable power source ever built. That alone would make the effort worthwhile.
Grigg's Hydrosonic Pump (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, as with any supposed "free energy" device, there's a lot of claims like, "Scientists have done tests that verify that it works," but I've never seen any published papers on the fact, and the device has been apparently known i
Re:Grigg's Hydrosonic Pump (Score:3, Informative)
interesting link... Rome Ga... went to school there. Interesting.
obligatory.. (Score:4, Informative)
*cough*google link [nytimes.com]*cough*
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
=Smidge=
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Think, McFly, think. (Score:4, Funny)
A FLUX capacitor.
DUH.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Canned Sunshine (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Canned Sunshine (Score:4, Funny)
A SUN in a jar? (Score:5, Funny)
double entendre (Score:5, Funny)
Re:double entendre (Score:2)
Cold fusion will always be with us (Score:5, Funny)
--------
Do you have Wireless-Enabled Hosting(tm) [chiralsoftware.net]?
Except that this isn't *cold* fusion (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Except that this isn't *cold* fusion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cold fusion will always be with us (Score:5, Informative)
Weekly Schedule (Score:5, Funny)
Monday: Patch Windows
Tuesday: Stop SCO's latest plan
Wednesday: Invent Fusion
Thursday: Patch Linux
Friday: Watch LoTR while patching Windows
Since they got Fusion out of the way early today, I think I have a little time to go bash Infinium Labs some more. Tally ho!
Lots of potential (Score:5, Interesting)
So, there may really be something to this. It would be great if it did work out.
Re:Lots of potential (Score:2)
Ain't plasma coooool? oh, wait...
Re:Lots of potential (Score:3, Funny)
I can make bubbles in my bathtub, and the sound generated during that process is not very high frequency...
It even produces a little bit of heat!
Re:Lots of potential -- harnessing it... (Score:5, Informative)
This would not generate any extra energy. It is simply using energy to cause vibrations that heat up water and generate steam. The change in phase causes a high enough pressure to cause a turbine to generate electricity. In each of those steps, energy is wasted (it's the law!).
What the article is talking about is supplying enough energy to facilitate a reaction that could cause two hydrogen atoms to form a helium atom. When this occurs, the mass of the helium atom is slightly less than the sum of the two hydrogen masses. Since thermodynamics says the mass had to go somewhere, we account for the loss with an increase in energy (a la E=mc^2). The amount of energy released by this reaction is theoretically substantially greater than the energy used to force the two atoms together. At least, that's the gist of it.
Don't confuse fusion with free energy,however. Fusion comes at a price, and it's the coversion of mass into heat that leaves you with two less hydrogens and one more helium, so there still is a fuel that is 'burned'. Luckily, our favorite proton-electron duo is the most abundant element in the universe.
Re:Lots of potential -- harnessing it... (Score:5, Informative)
They involve heavy hydrogen (deuterium, hydrogen with a neutron) and heavy-heavy hydrogen (tritium, hydrogen with two neutrons), which is much more rare. The result, by the way, is not just one helium - it's a helium and a neutron for a net mass loss of about 2AU per reaction.
The activation cost of fusion using normal water is much, much higher than when using heavy water. There are processes to produce both of these isotopes (tritium can be produced as a side-reaction from the fusion, but deuterium must be filtered from water), but they're not especially capable of producing large quantities easily. But we've got to crawl before we can walk; once we get controllable, sustainable, and energy producing fusion, then we can worry about switching over to a fuel source that will actually make it practical to use for power.
Re:Lots of potential -- harnessing it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll believe it when... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll believe it when... (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe he meant "dining" - you know, joining together in a celebratory feast. I guess that would mean they already look good and don't have to worry about it?
It's possible he meant "dicing" - either chopping up meat for their dinner, or chopping up celery for their diet. Or maybe rolling a d20 (Save vs Poison or take 10d6 of damage from radiation.)
Hypothetically, the word could be "diving" but that would obviously be ridiculous.
Sorry, thought this was an Episode 3 item. (Score:4, Funny)
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY (Score:4, Funny)
Eh (Score:5, Interesting)
reaim your horseshoes (Score:5, Insightful)
When fusion is industrialized, I expect that some processes will far exceed the fusion thresholds, for their own specific reasons. The threshold is not a bullseye, but rather a welcoming shore of a virgin territory. News of our drawing ever nearer is tantalizing, but not discouraging, as we prepare to colonize the territory.
Re:reaim your horseshoes (Score:5, Informative)
In other substances, nothing seemed quite as good as water. Glycerine and alcohol were both within a factor of two; everything else was lower. Lower molecular density seems to give higher maximum temperature (although I'd have to check the theory to verify this isn't just a coincidence), so trying liquid helium might be cute... but I can't believe it'll help much.
Re:reaim your horseshoes (Score:3, Informative)
You absolutely need resonance effects to make sonoluminescence work without having obscene power input.
Farnsworth Fusor has done this for 40 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Desktop fusion is no big deal, after all - the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor (
Here's a link [wikipedia.org] ) does this.
The fusor operates by accelerating deuterons in a static electrical field towards a central locus ('juicy nugat center')(grin).
The trick to a fusor is that there's a lot of possible factors to setting one up:
among other factors. more info is at a homebrew club of amateur experimentors [fusor.net]
I've been tempted to try this, but my wife has overruled all discussion of it. She has something against hot neutron sources in the house when we have 3 small kids. Alas. (Especially since this thing emits the particles in 3 dimensions, so shielding would be significant.)
SO: MY QUESTION FOR THE EXPERIMENTERS: WHAT IS THE TOTAL ENERGY (JOULES) PUT INTO THIS EXPERIMENT VS. HOW MUCH EMITTED? Is this going to be another wildly inefficient methodology, or does it have advantages over Fusor or Tocamak designs?
-- Kevin J. Rice
Re:Farnsworth Fusor has done this for 40 years (Score:5, Informative)
With no additional gas, the bubble size is probably ROUGHLY 10^15 atoms (read as 10^10 - 10^20), depending on a million things. This is at a frequency of roughly (not quite as rough, but close) 10^5 Hz. Assume 10^18 deuterium atoms, for fun, and 0.01% D-D fusion. That gives you (roughly, what, 3.3 MeV for D-D fusion?) around 5kW to play with.
Understand that these numbers are rougher than back of the envelope... these are the kind you do when the envelope will never be found. But if you can pull off fusion at all in sonoluminescence (which is the question at hand), you're pretty much guaranteed decent return on investment.
Re:Eh? heh (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eh? heh (Score:3, Informative)
Also, it's true, we didn't try to recreate the exact same conditions as in this latest paper, mostly because our work predates it; and I don't even know what there solvent is, so I can't even say for sure if we've tested that. But we did reproduce most of the earlier work that lead to the other fifty or sixty claims of 'fusion' in sonoluminescence, with consistent negative results; we also verified the (accepted) fact that solvent doesn't make a huge difference.
Re:Eh? heh (Score:3, Interesting)
In other news, (Score:5, Funny)
obligatore simpsons quote (Score:3, Funny)
Young lady, in this house we obey the second law of thermodynamics!
Re:obligatore simpsons quote (Score:4, Informative)
Actually:
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" [fortunecity.com]
Important to note... (Score:5, Informative)
Please note that this is *NOT* cold fusion.
Re:Important to note... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it is.
The surrounding fluid within which the atoms being forced together is cold. The palladium rods which "contained" and "violently forced together" the atoms in "cold fusion" was cold.
In both cases the atoms being forced together were effectively (on the microscopic scale), hot. That doesn't stop us from calling both "cold fusion", to distinguish it from very large scale macroscopic super-heated environments.
Neither process has two COLD helium atoms m
Re:Important to note... (Score:3, Informative)
The surrounding fluid within which the atoms being forced together is cold.
The fluid is cold of course, but the middle of the bubble is very hot due to compression, it's in the article. And the reaction takes place in this little area (middle of the bubble) that *is* very hot.
The palladium rods which "contained" and "violently forced together" the atoms in "cold fusion" was cold.
Yes but here the atoms themselves were hot, not the surrounding material. That's a huge difference because in
Re:Important to note... (Score:3, Offtopic)
Here we clearly have very high temperatures. Enough to create hot fusion reactions, the same we can produce in tokamaks and H bombs.
Link from a local paper (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting quote from the article:"Willy Moss has been trying to reach that brass ring for a long time, and he's had way more money than Taleyarkhan and way more facilities," George said. "And when Taleyarkhan said he had neutrons, (Moss) sort of chimed in and said, 'No, no you don't,' because he was hard on the trail trying to get there first."
Seems there is a bit of anonymity here. In the defense of the researcher(s):The evidence now is "far more compelling," he said. "This time around, before publication took place, I deliberately involved a series of highly acclaimed physicists to come down to the lab and review the experimental setup and the way we were obtaining data and look at the experimental data."
After receiving positive reviews from them, he took the findings to the management of Oak Ridge, which conducted its own internal review, making the forthcoming publication "perhaps the most peer-reviewed paper in the history of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Taleyarkhan said.
Oils replacement (Score:3, Insightful)
But when will it roll out and effect the everyday Joe?
Just curious why we're always pushing the limit higher, when we haven't pushed the bar up.
Re:Oils replacement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oils replacement (Score:5, Interesting)
Since it is a nitrogen fixating crop, nitrogen-based fertilizers would not be needed (such fertilizers are generally made from fossil fuel sources). Since hemp is naturally pest and disease resistant, herbacides and pesticides would not be needed (both of which are produced from oil). Used in rotation with other food crops (where possible to grow), use fertilizers, pesticides and herbacides for those crops would be reduced and/or eliminated.
The one great thing about bio-fuels over fossil fuels is that while both give off emmissions (though bio-fuels are typically lower), only bio-fuels close the carbon cycle (ie, carbon mono/dioxides) - whereas fossil fuels release the stored carbon back into the envioronment.
I tend to wonder if I will ever see hemp-based biofuel production in the US in my lifetime - I just recieved a letter back from one of my state reps about hemp and biofuel production, and I wasn't very impressed...
Re:Oils replacement (Score:3, Informative)
It'd be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
if this particular discovery bears fruit, it might be really cool, as the cost for implementing it appears much lower than other attempted fusion experiments. But, how much would a true power plant cost? Or, how much would a "home unit" cost, since distributing the grid would probably be a better long-term solution to our power needs.
Then come the obvious questions about environmental impacts, as energy = heat, and here is an energy source without effective limits, hence limitless energy, and limitless heat. Perhaps they can use some of this limitless energy to pump the generated heat out of the planet? (ie, big heat radiators? Energy recycling? Something totally out of my depth?)
Re:It'd be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Course we have no idea whether the claim is true. It needs to be verified by reputable third parties. Or if it could ever be practical for energy production.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
$wittySig
Sonoluminescence 101 (Score:5, Informative)
Sonoluminescence: an Introduction [llnl.gov]
Single Bubble Sonoluminescence HOWTO [physik3.gwdg.de]
Oh! Ok, I'll check in the garage... (Score:4, Funny)
"Sun in a jar" (Score:3, Funny)
Hope it can be reproduced (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet that radioactive bubbly acetone... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm cracking my knuckles (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.sciencenews.org/scripts/prin
what I found particularly funny/interesting is the last lines of the article, which read:
"Cavitation bubbles in synovial fluid may even explain the sound of "cracking" knuckles, he ventures. And if that's the case, he says, "I'd be willing to bet pitchers of beer that cracking knuckles will also generate small amounts of luminescence."
Voodoo Science? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a few questions for this type of fusion (Those of you who have read the book, or are up on the cold fusion controversy will get this):
1) Can I have a cup of tea?
2) How many neutrons are emitted over the background noise?
3) How is the health of the lab assistant? (Related to question 2).
You better believe it..... (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, ran into three of them on the way to lunch this afternoon at the corner of Hargett and Fayetteville St.........
Re:You better believe it..... (Score:3, Funny)
Good News, Bad News (Score:5, Funny)
Good News:
Piping hot coffee or soup in seconds.
Bad News:
Everything metal in kitchen becomes mildly radioactive from neutron bombardment.
Good News:
Rats, mice, cockroaches hate the sound of a sonofusor in operation, emptying cities of vermin.
Bad News:
Sound also drives dogs into a frenzy of mindless leg-humping. Except Boston Terriers, whose tightly sutured little skulls explode.
Good News:
Leads to development of ultra-efficient (but low thrust) rocket motor that uses water as a reaction mass.
Bad News:
All water outside of Mars orbit turn out to be owned by Capella OmniVolatile GMBH, who charge a heavy fee, payable in increasingly rare Boston Terriers.
Stefan Jones
Favorite line of the article (Score:3, Funny)
If you make a revolutionary discovery.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Issuing a press release to the general public before peer review just reeks of pseudoscience. "Look what we did! It's so cool that the respected journal would have covered it up! In your face, respected journal!"
Sure, what they claim may be possible, but I'll be much less likely to believe it until I see it validated by other scientists.
...obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:2, Funny)
>>>JasonF, a scientist at NCSU, has created a perpetual motion machine!
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer S.
Re:What would happen if... (Score:5, Informative)
A drinking-cup sized chunk of fusion wouldn't have much umph at all. Considernig the processes going on are completely different from the kind in hydrogen fusion bombs, I'd say the worst explosion is from overheating and overpressurizing of the chamber - something like a handgrenade.
=Smidge=
Re:What would happen if... (Score:5, Informative)
A major difference between the sun and a large jar is mass and pressure. Stars must be larger than a certain mass threshold to be capable of a supernova event. At this time I forget what that threshold is but I do know that if Jupiter (sometimes considered a brown dwarf star) collapsed to become a true star it could not end its life in a supernova but it could produce nova events during its life span. The reason for this is that it does not have the mass to generate the inward pressure needed to suppress the outward pressure of the reaction. As the outward pressure builds up it will eventually become greater than the inward pressure, once it does it will become a nova. If the inward pressure is sufficiently powerful the star will begin to fuse higher elements (e.g. H+H=He, He+He=Li, etc.) and the outward pressure will exceed the inward pressure and in this case will result in a supernova destroying the star. A jar (or even an eventual facility based on this technology) simply is not massive enough to produce a supernova; this is what makes fusion as a power source so attractive. Without monitoring and adjustments the reaction simply ends. Our current fission systems do not require an artificial environment to make them function. I.E. the fission reactions have occurred naturally here on Earth and can have uncontrollable catastrophic results if not carefully monitored and adjusted.
NarratorDan
Re:What am I missing? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a separate point, I don't entirely buy the "less radioactive waste" argument of this press release or the fusion community in general - I used to work in a physics lab, and one of the PhDs there made what I thought was an excellent point - In order for fusion to be commercially viable, ultimately the reaction has to turn a generator somehow, probably via heat generated by fast neutrons. He couldn't see how fast neutrons from a fusion reaction could be any less nasty than fast neutrons generated by a conventional fission reaction.
Am I off in the weeds here, or is this correct? Anyone out there with nuclear physics experience care to weigh in with an opinion?
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Informative)
So yes this would produce radioactive material too, but a material less nasty and lesser material than a fission reaction.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for clearing up the solvent... makes sense. Acetone is good stuff for sono, and it has a decent density of hydrogen/deuterium. I'd like to know if they really found an effect they could obtain with acetone and not water...
So let's skip the D and add a bit of boric acid. (Score:3, Informative)
As a separate point, I don't entirely buy the "less radioactive waste" argument [...] In order for fusion to be commercially viable, ultimately the reaction has to turn a generator somehow, probably via heat generated by fast neutrons. He couldn't see how fast neutrons from a fusion reaction could be any less nasty than fast n
It's not the fast neutrons (Score:5, Informative)
Most radioactive waste from a fission power plant comes from decaying fission fragments - that is the left-over elements which are produced after the fissile material has split and released its energy in the form of the kinetic energy of the fission fragments which find themselves awfully close together with the same charge and not enough of the strong nuclear force to hold things together, plus the kinetic energy of the neutrons born from the fission process and some directly produced radiation.
These fission fragments then decay through a long decay chain up toward lead. Most of them have relatively long lives and produce high energy gamma so they create a problem.
Fusion power will also create fusion products - but those products tend to be more stable - grabbing neutrons from the stew and much more rapidly settling down into nuclides that are much less radioactive than those produced by fission.
Of course there ARE fast neutrons produced during the fission and fusion process. Neutrons born from fission are fast neutrons, very high energy. In all fission power reactors those neutrons have to be slowed into thermal equilibrium (lose a LOT of energy) by having elastic collisions with some material - say the hydrogen atoms in water (the material that slows the neutrons is called a "moderator") so they have a reasonable chance of interacting with another fuel atom and cause fission. U235 likes thermal neutrons to fission.
During the termalization process some neutrons will scatter out of the core, "leaking out" of the reactor core. And they interact with the primary shield. They make some things radioactive. The materials that go into reactor construction are choosen to reduce the nasty things that can get really radioactive - like, say, cobalt one of whose isotopes (Cobalt-60) decays giving off a very nasty gamma which lead doesn't shield particularly well. (another story).
So some materials will be irratdiated by the high energy neutron flux of a fission reactor and become radioactive. But the worst is done by the fission products of the reactor. Think one Curie of waste per watt of power at the end of core life as a thumb rule and remember that a Curie is one whale of a lot of radioactivity.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:4, Insightful)
> equal what goes in...
Well you had better go take a physics course if you wish to understand this topic because the proposition is that a non chemical process (fusion) is at work.
> What is this solvent?
Who cares at this early stage. If the process proves out the race will be on to find the ingredients/processes that produce the holy grail of fusion research; a net gain in energy. Until that happens it is only a labratory toy, even assuming fusion is actually occuring.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a spherical flask, around 100ml or so. Bigger will mean lower frequencies but higher amplitudes needed. Fill the flask with water from the tap, up until the mensicus is just at the neck of the flask (that is, the water body is as close to spherical as possible). Attach on opposite sides of the flask two speakers, and somewhere else (we just put it between the two speakers, 90 degrees from each, but it doesn't really matter) a microphone.
Hook up a frequency generator to your speakers. Hook up your mic to a 'scope. You'll see the frequency being generated being picked up, slightly muffled and distorted, by the microphone. Tune your frequency until you get resonance; it'll be really, really obvious as the peaks of the mic output become much sharper than the input frequency. The actual frequency depends greatly on the water volume, and is very sensitive to temperature; for our particular setup 48kHz - 52kHz seems about right.
Turn off the light. Allow your eyes about 10 minutes to adjust. With this setup, you'll have light about as bright as a 5th-magnitude star. Any stray light at all will limit your detection. Slowly pump up the amplitude of your input. As the amplitude goes up, resonance frequency changes slightly, so tune as needed. The total amplitude needed is not very high, but it's probably going to be in the top half of a non-amplified signal generator's range.
The gas in the bubble, in this case, is a combination of (some) water vapor and (mostly) outgassed dissolved gasses. That's why we used tap water, above. Bottled water has much less dissolved gasses, so will be much dimmer. Also, water that sits there outgasses, so if you don't change your water it'll get dimmer over time. But we can exploit the fact that it's this added gas that glows, if we want.
Drill a very small hole (seven mil, for us) in the exact bottom of your glass flask. Attach a capilary of the same ID, or a bit more. Attach capilary to a gas canister, and input a low flow rate of gas while running the experiment as above. The idea is to have a near-constant flow of extremely small gas bubbles. If the bubbles are too big, nothing will happen at all; the temperature doesn't get high enough. If there are too many bubbles, you disturb resonance something awful. If the bubbles don't pass through the center, they'll be ignored. But if you get it just right, you'll get a nice burst of light (0th or 1st magnitude) when each bubble goes through, appearing as a constant point of light to the naked eye.
Argon works really nicely for this. Nitrogen works too. You don't want to use anything that dissolves too easily, because it will saturate the water; too much gas outgassing results in bubbles too big to glow. And you'll have to chance the water quite often, because everything will dissolve too much eventually (although helium seems to either dissolve less or just outgas from the top of the flask more quickly).
I presume what they're using in this experiment is hydrogen/deuterium gas, either fed in ordissolved in the water.
Since I should be studying for a midterm, I'll cut off my tutorial now, but feel free to ask more!
Re:Gas used (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gas used (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Informative)
Keeping the spherical shape, though, it going to either require a container or something close to magic. When you put sound waves through the sphere, it's going to distort, and resonance means that you're in a positive feedback
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Informative)
The mic is entirely for your own reading, if you're tuning frequency by hand. Anything that gives a clean output in the 60kHz range is fine, but, of course, this isn't a standard microphone.
Re:Science by press release (Score:5, Informative)
Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement.
This approach, called bubble fusion, and the new experimental results are being published in an extensively peer-reviewed article titled "Additional Evidence of Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation," which is scheduled to be posted on Physical Review E's Web site and published in its journal this month.
I did a search at the Physics Review E site [aps.org], but it's not there yet.
Nevertheless, like you, I feel that the arrival of a press release before the paper appears is something of a red flag - Especially in this particular subfield of physics.
Re:Science by press release (Score:5, Informative)
It seems you didn't look at the press release at all. The sub-title of which being "Physical Review E publishes paper on fusion experiment conducted with upgraded measurement system". So, in case you have trouble interpreting that, what they are saying is that this has been peer reviewed, and it will be published, in a respectable journal.
Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)
Producing the energy is just the first step. If this does actually work you can bet your testicles that someone will figure out a way to harvest the energy.