UCLA trio creates nuclear fusion with tiny device
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
In a remarkable laboratory experiment that holds promise for technological
advancement, a UCLA graduate student and two members of the California
NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed an inexpensive miniature
device that can create nuclear fusion, the process that powers the
sun and the stars and is perhaps the only unlimited, environmentally
benign and genuinely sustainable energy source.
Physics Professor Seth Putterman, Chemistry Professor Jim Gimzewski
and graduate student Brian Naranjo used a tiny pyroelectric crystal
to generate an electric field that produced small amounts of energy
at room temperature. They did this by heating the crystal in a chamber
filled with deuterium gas, creating an electric field of positively
charged deuterium atoms. Fusion resulted when some of the atoms
struck a deuterium-embedded target nearby, emitting neutrons and
producing helium.
“It is amazingly simple and remarkably compact,” Putterman
said of the foot-long, cylinder-shaped generator, which could be
“as small as a ping-pong ball” in the near future. It
could be used as the front end for a neutron camera for screening
airport baggage and cargo containers. “The crystal can also
be configured to make X-rays for the therapeutic treatment of tumors,”
Putterman said.
The experiment, reported April 28 in the journal Nature, received
international attention for its credibility. A 1989 claim of “cold
fusion” by two researchers at the University of Utah and Britain’s
Southampton University was widely discredited after scientists failed
to replicate the experiment.
Michael Saltmarsh, a retired scientist who resolved a 2002 dispute
over another
discredited fusion experiment, told Nature that when he saw the
article published by the UCLA researchers in the journal, “my
first reaction was, ‘Oh no, not another tabletop fusion paper.’
But they’ve built a neat little accelerator. I’m pretty
sure no one has been able to generate neutrons in this way before.”
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