The company has not published the results of its research in peer-reviewed scientific journals, leaving many scientists dubious. I can t imagine who they re getting money from. Maybe the people who are giving them money don t care about peer review, said William Moss, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore. If they can demonstrate that there s some science here, then that s fantastic. The world is waiting for it.
Fusion involves heating a mixture of hydrogen isotopes hydrogen atoms with neutrons inside.
When they get hot enough, atoms fuse to form helium and expel neutrons and energy. The most common way to start fusion is by bombarding a pellet of neutron-laden hydrogen atoms with a laser. Sonoluminescence uses sound waves to collapse tiny bubbles of gas suspended in liquid, generating heat and light. Both sonoluminescence and fusion are proven physical phenomena, but nobody has been able to demonstrate that sonoluminescence can generate enough heat to fuse nuclei, said Robert Apfel, a mechanical engineer at Yale University who studies sonoluminescence. The temperatures needed for fusion are in the hundreds of thousands of degrees Celsius, while temperatures measured from collapsing bubbles have reached only 20,000 to 30,000 degrees Celsius.