Catalytic Fusion and the Interface between Insulators and Transition Metals

Cold fusion uses a catalyzed configuration change to replace plasma fusion's need for high energy particle collisions.1 In radiationless cold fusion the configuration change is a coherent partitioning of deuterons into fractional pieces within a set of potential wells provided by a hosting lattice.2 The coherently partitioned matter distribution is a Bloch wave function. Alpha addition transmutations3 require active deuterium in the form of Bloch function deuterons with 2-dimensional periodic symmetry.4,5 The configuration change to Bloch form has been modeled as occurring in the interface volume between a salt and Pd metal. In Arata and Zhang radiationless cold fusion6-8 reactive deuterons are modeled by Bloch ions with 3-dimensional periodic symmetry hosted in metallic nano crystals.5 The nano crystals are isolated by salt-metal interfaces. In both cases the fusion process is modeled as a Li-Feshbach resonance transition to an excited nucleus state, with subsequent energy transfer to a metal lattice by phonon cascade.5 The lattice structure of the deuterons is preserved in the product nucleus until the energy transfer is completed. For the 2-dimensional symmetry case, the intermediate nucleus or many-body nuclear system can sometimes be observed in "flake" lattice form, providing insight about the process.5 Research on salt-metal interfaces could facilitate cold fusion technology.