DNAunion: Susan felt the need to back up her statements on cold fusion, so I
felt I should to. But since I no longer have Susan's e-mail, I had to create
one from scratch.
Note that in the following quote, the fusing of two medium-weight nuclei at a
relatively low energy is referred to as *cold fusion*. Note further that
this is done *without* being qualifying by enclosing the words in double
quotes: i.e., it is cold fusion and not "cold fusion".
"Step aside, element 114; there's a new heavyweight champ. Physicists at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced earlier this
week that they have created two new superheavy elements, tipping the scales
at 118 and 116 protons. The new heavyweights come as something of a surprise,
as standard theories had suggested that the [cold fusion] technique used to
create them--fusing two medium-weight nuclei at a relatively low
energy--should top out at 112.
…
Although the [element] 114 work has yet to be duplicated, the success marked
an unexpected renaissance for a previously successful technique known as hot
fusion, in which a beam of light isotopes is smashed into a heavier target,
such as plutonium. Prior to that success, the technique of choice had been
cold fusion, a gentler collision of medium-sized isotopes. Researchers at the
Institute for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, used the
technique to lay claim to five elements from 107 to 112 since the early
1980s. Conventional theories suggested that neither technique [neither hot
fusion nor cold fusion] would be able to form elements as big as 118 without
them instantly breaking apart, or fissioning.
The Berkeley team's big break came at the prodding of Robert Smola«nczuk, a
visiting theorist from the Soltan Institute for Nuclear Studies in Poland,
who suggested that there may still be a little warmth left in cold fusion.
His calculations suggested that bombarding a lead target with krypton ions
would have reasonable odds of producing a few atoms of 118 after all: The
compound nucleus, he found, was less likely to fission than previously
thought. " (Robert F. Service, Berkeley Crew Bags Element 118, Science,
Volume 284, Number 5421, Issue of 11 Jun 1999, p. 1751)
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