Preface -The Data to Reconcile 

The original data for most cold fusion research can be found at a site maintained by Jed Rothwell,  lenr-canr.org . This site is a godsend for anyone interested in cold fusion. The acronyms in the address stand for "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" and "Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions" respectively. To save time we recommend the "Special Collections" section of "Notable Papers".

The rest of this section will lay out the the data or behavior that a successful theory must address. There will be no discussion of the many transmutation results. The transmutation reactions are presumed to be a ramification of the main fusion reaction. We have not done the physics to explore these results and do not believe they are germane to the cold fusion mechanism, and so leave it for others to explore.

Below is a listing of the experimentally verified behavior to be explained:

    1) Production of heat

    2) Production of He4 somewhat commensurate of the reaction d+d => He4 ~24 MeV.

    3) Bulk Palladium taking many days past full loading to achieve excess heat

    4) The Arrata palladium black in a palladium cathode giving very repeatable results

    5) The Navy's co-deposition  results give excess heat in minutes, not days after complete Palladium deposition, with heat in 10's of microns sized bursts of heat as seen by IR camera.Also occasional melted metal of the same size range.

    6) High energy alpha particles found by the Navy and others using CR-39

    7) Heat production accelerated with heat

    8) Heat after death phenomena

    9) Heat from deuterium gas loaded palladium on carbon

    10) Tritium production some 3 to 5 orders of magnitude lower than helium

    11) Very few neutrons and lack of gammas

    12) Inconsistent reproduction of heat (we don't think this is a valid concern, as anyone that has spent time in a laboratory doing chemistry wouldn't be concerned with this. Just shows lack of knowledge about the mechanism, which we all concede) 

and some anecdotal things that need to be explained,

    13) A total melt down of a 1 cm cube in Fleishman and Pons lab

    14) Mizuno's massive heat after death

It wasn't obvious to us, when we started out, how all this seemingly contradictory behavior could be explained.  It turns out that all of the above is explained quite nicely from a fairly simple mechanism. In our next section we will introduce the mechanism, which will be followed by a thorough development of the physics according to the outline in the previous section.