COLD FUSION RESULTS IN BARC EXPERIMENTS

Experiments were initiated at Trombay during the first week of April 1989 to verify the widely reported claims of the occurrence of cold fusion. A large burst of ≈ 2 × 10 7 neutrons was first detected on April 21st with a Pd-Ni electrolytic cell. The neutron counting rate, averaged over a 5 minute interval, was a couple of orders of magnitude larger than that of background count rates. In this experiment the tritium level in the D2O electrolyte jumped from the initial stock solution value of 2.6 Bq/ml to a 5.6 × 10 4 Bq/ml, an increase by over four orders of magnitude. The total quantity of tritium generated corresponds to ≈ 10 16 atoms suggesting a neutron to tritium channel branching ratio of less than 10 -8 in cold fusion. Significant quantities of neutrons and tritium were also observed to be produced in gas loaded Ti and Pd samples. Autoradiography of D2 loaded Ti disc targets have shown a number of hot spots indicating uneven distribution of tritium production in the near-surface region. On the whole the Trombay experiments have unequivocally confirmed the occurrence of cold fusion reactions both in Pd and Ti metallic lattices loaded with deuterium.