Peregrinations on cold fusion

Abstract

Attention is focused on the possibility of resonance-enhanced deuteron Coulomb barrier penetration. Because of the many-body nature of the interactions of room-temperature deuterons diffusing through a lattice possessing deuterons in many of the interstitial positions, the diffusing deuterons can resonate on the atomic scale in the potential wells bounded by the ascending walls of adjacent Coulomb barriers and thereby penetrate the Coulomb barriers in a fashion vastly underestimated by two-body calculations in which wells for possible resonance are absent. Indeed, perhaps the lack of robust reproducibility in cold fusion originates from the narrowness of such transmission resonances.