Your poll does not include the option, “No change, because this has nothing to do with traditional cold fusion”. Rossi’s E-Cat employs nickel, not palladium.
Traditional cold fusion is fusion of deuterium in palladium and has been reported by a number of labs across several decades. They get heat and new isotopes, they don’t get gamma rays. The main problems are (1) what force overcomes the charge repulsion that should keep the deuteriums apart (2) why aren’t gamma rays being produced.
Ron Maimon has a new theory (unpublished, but discussed in various forums) in which the fusion is a d-d-Pd three-body interaction in which electrostatic interaction with the Pd nucleus allows otherwise forbidden transitions, increasing the probability of d-d fusion. If I have the details right, the deuterium wavefunctions are overlapping near the palladium nucleus; the trigger is an electron falling into a hole in the Pd inner shell, producing a 20 keV photon which is the energetic input to the d-d-Pd interaction; and then the energy is released as the kinetic energy of alpha particles, which travel through the palladium atomic lattice, knocking out inner-shell electrons and causing a chain reaction. I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but the idea gives a theorist something to work with.
So the Rossi saga is irrelevant for traditional cold fusion, the reality of which should be judged on the basis of a completely different body of theory and experiment.
Your poll does not include the option, “No change, because this has nothing to do with traditional cold fusion”. Rossi’s E-Cat employs nickel, not palladium.
Traditional cold fusion is fusion of deuterium in palladium and has been reported by a number of labs across several decades. They get heat and new isotopes, they don’t get gamma rays. The main problems are (1) what force overcomes the charge repulsion that should keep the deuteriums apart (2) why aren’t gamma rays being produced.
Ron Maimon has a new theory (unpublished, but discussed in various forums) in which the fusion is a d-d-Pd three-body interaction in which electrostatic interaction with the Pd nucleus allows otherwise forbidden transitions, increasing the probability of d-d fusion. If I have the details right, the deuterium wavefunctions are overlapping near the palladium nucleus; the trigger is an electron falling into a hole in the Pd inner shell, producing a 20 keV photon which is the energetic input to the d-d-Pd interaction; and then the energy is released as the kinetic energy of alpha particles, which travel through the palladium atomic lattice, knocking out inner-shell electrons and causing a chain reaction. I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but the idea gives a theorist something to work with.
So the Rossi saga is irrelevant for traditional cold fusion, the reality of which should be judged on the basis of a completely different body of theory and experiment.
I’m happy to subsume that under “no change (because I read the paper but it didn’t move me either way)”.