Muon fusion

A method of inducing fusion at room temperature with subatomic particles called muons has been demonstrated. The production of muons requires a large particle accelerator. The energy used in the particle accelerator is millions of times greater than the energy released by muon fusion. Muon fusion appears to be a laboratory curiosity with little chance of providing an energy source. 

In 2002 neither muon fusion nor palladium enhanced room temperature fusion appear to have potential for the generation of sufficient energy to be useful for the base load energy system. Nevertheless, the fusion development agency must monitor these research activities to ensure that any new developments are exploited as rapidly as possible. 

Cartesian multipole moments, 729 catalyzed muon fusion, 327, 328... 

Room temperature fusion reactions, albeit low probabiHty ones, are not a new concept, having been postulated in 1948 and verified experimentally in 1956 (22), in a form of fusion known as muon-catalized fusion. Since the 1989 announcement, however, international scientific skepticism has grown to the point that cold fusion is not considered a serious subject by most scientists. FoUow-on experiments, conducted in many prestigious laboratories, have failed to confirm the claims, and although some unexplained and intellectually interesting phenomena have been recorded, the results have remained irreproducable and, thus far, not accepted by the scientific community. 

In this article, we shall focus on the reactions of muonic hydrogen atoms and molecules, and their energy dependent properties revealed by a newly developed time-of-flight spectroscopy technique [2,3,4,5], with particular emphasis on reactions related to muon catalyzed fusion phenomena. 

A negative muon can participate in a variety of atomic and molecular processes. A muonic atom is formed when a muon stops in matter replacing an electron. A muonic atom interacting with ordinary atoms or molecules can form a muonic molecule. The latter in turn can result in fusion reactions between the nuclei if the target consists of hydrogen isotopes, a phenomenon known as muon catalyzed fusion (pCF) [6]. 

A single muon stopped in a target of deuterium-tritium mixture can catalyze more than 100 fusions, but this number is limited by two major bottle-necks. One is the rate at which a muon can go through the catalysis cycle before its decay (cycling rate), and another is a poisoning process called p-a sticking in which, with a probability u)s < 0.01, the muon gets captured after the fusion reaction to atomic bound states of the fusion product 4He, and hence lost from the cycle (see Section 5). 

Fig. 6. Time-of-flight fusion spectrum (error bars) and simulation spectrum (histogram), normalized the number of incident muons iVM. Also plotted are simulated contributions from different resonance peaks given by the time-energy correlated events...

Collision-Induced Coherences in Optical Physics, G. S. Agarwal Muon-Catalyzed Fusion, Johann Rafelski and Helga E. Rafelski... 

Consequences for the Quest of Superconductors Photostability of Proteins and DNA Muon-Catalyzed Nuclear Fusion Russian Dolls or a Molecule Within a Molecule... 

Some molecules look really peculiar. They may contain a muon instead of an electron. A muon is an unstable particle with the charge of an electron and mass equal to 207 electronic masses. For such a mass, assuming that nuclei are infinitely heavier than muon looks like a very bad approximation. Therefore, the calculations need to be non-adiabatic. The first eomputations for muonic molecules were performed by Kolos, Roothaan, and Sack in 1960. The idea behind the project was mnon-catalyzed fusion of deuterium (d) and tritium (t) the abbreviations here pertain to the nnclei only. This fascinating problem was proposed by Andrei Sakharov. Its essence is as follows. 

The idea of muon-induced fusion was conceived by Sakharov in 1945, in his first... 

Deuteron and tritium bound together represent a helium nueleus. One muon may participate in about 200-300 such muon-catalyzed fusion processes. Everybody knows how much effort and money has been spent for decades (for the moment in vain) to ignite the nuclear synthesis d -H t - He. Muon-catalyzed fusion might be an alternative solution. If the muon project were successful, humanity would have access to a practically unlimited source of energy. Unfortunately, theoretical investigations suggest that the experimental yield already achieved is about the maximum theoretical value. ... 

The commercial viability of this process will not be an option unless we can demonstrate 9tX) fusion events for each muon. About 10 g of deuterium and 15 g of tritium fusion would then be sufficient to supply the average person with electricity for life. 

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