Observation of Tritium in Gas/plasma Loaded Titanium Samples

The observation of significant neutron yield from gas loaded titanium samples at Frascati in April 1989 opened up an alternate pathway to the investigation of anomalous nuclear phenomena in deuterium/solid systems, complimenting the electrolytic approach. Since then atleast six different groups have successfully measured burst neutron emission from deuterated titanium shavings following the Frascati methodology, the special feature of which was the use of liquid nitrogen to create repeated thermal cycles resulting in the production of non-equilibrium conditions in the deuterated samples. At Trombay several variations of the gas loading procedure have been investigated including induction heating of single machined titanium targets in a glass chamber as well as use of a plasma focus device for deuteriding its central titanium electrode. Stemming from earlier observations both at BARC and elsewhere that tritium yield is 10 times higher than neutron output in cold fusion experiments, we have channelised our efforts to the search for tritium rather than neutrons. The presence of tritium in a variety gas/plasma loaded titanium samples has been established successfully through a direct measurement of the radiations emitted as a result of tritium decay, in contradistinction to other groups who have looked for tritium in the extracted gases. In some samples we have thus observed tritium levels of over 10 MBq with a corresponding (t/d) ratio of > 10. One of the most interesting findings to emerge out of the autoradiographic imaging of deuterated Ti samples from different experiments is the fact that tritium is invariably concentrated in highly localized spots (fraction of a millimeter or less in size) each containing typically about 10 to 10 atoms (2 to 200 K Bq) of tritium. If this is viewed in the light of the observations of other groups notably, the Los Alamos work, that neutrons are produced in bunches of 30 to 300 within time spans of microseconds and also that the neutron-to-tritium yield ratio is in the range of 10 to 10, it is tempting to speculate that in these titanium samples perhaps some kind of a cascade reaction or micronuclear explosion probably occurs in specific sites in the near surface region