Scholarlink

<p>Nuclear fusion requires overcoming or traversing a repulsive Coulomb barrier of hundreds of kiloelectronvolts, rendering the probability of fusion at sub-keV energies vanishingly small. Yet in condensed matter, the electronic and structural environment of reacting nuclei can profoundly alter fusion rates. Here we demonstrate that deuterium–deuterium fusion within metallic foils exhibits a pronounced reaction yield plateau (i.e., a finite, non-vanishing yield floor) below 2 keV—in stark contrast to the expected exponential suppression at low energy. At the lowest energies measured, this corresponds to fusion yields enhanced by more than 10¹⁸ relative to bare-nucleus (unscreened) expectations. Using a dual-chamber platform that combines electrochemical deuterium loading with low-energy ion-beam bombardment, we observe this behavior in both palladium and titanium hydrides. These results reveal a previously unrecognized regime of low-energy nuclear reactions in solids, demonstrating that materials degrees of freedom can fundamentally renormalize tunneling probabilities and fusion cross-sections.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Enhanced nuclear fusion in the sub-keV energy regime

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月18日

查看全文
  • Micah E. Karahadian,
  • Matthew Colborne,
  • Arun Persaud,
  • Thomas Schenkel,
  • Jeremy N. Munday

摘要

Nuclear fusion requires overcoming or traversing a repulsive Coulomb barrier of hundreds of kiloelectronvolts, rendering the probability of fusion at sub-keV energies vanishingly small. Yet in condensed matter, the electronic and structural environment of reacting nuclei can profoundly alter fusion rates. Here we demonstrate that deuterium–deuterium fusion within metallic foils exhibits a pronounced reaction yield plateau (i.e., a finite, non-vanishing yield floor) below 2 keV—in stark contrast to the expected exponential suppression at low energy. At the lowest energies measured, this corresponds to fusion yields enhanced by more than 10¹⁸ relative to bare-nucleus (unscreened) expectations. Using a dual-chamber platform that combines electrochemical deuterium loading with low-energy ion-beam bombardment, we observe this behavior in both palladium and titanium hydrides. These results reveal a previously unrecognized regime of low-energy nuclear reactions in solids, demonstrating that materials degrees of freedom can fundamentally renormalize tunneling probabilities and fusion cross-sections.