DREAMS of a table-top nuclear fusion reactor just won't go away. The latest glimmer of hope comes from an experiment in sonofusion - the supposed phenomenon in which imploding bubbles in specially prepared liquids are said to create temperatures high enough to trigger nuclear fusion.
The debate started in earnest in 2002 when nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan, who was then at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and his colleagues reported seeing sonofusion in a beaker of acetone in which all the hydrogen atoms had been replaced with the heavier isotope, deuterium. They bombarded the deuterated liquid with neutrons to seed it with bubbles a few nanometres across and then set up powerful standing waves within the liquid by blasting it with sound. The standing waves caused the bubbles to grow and then collapse in a flash of light.
The researchers claimed that the energy of the flash was ...
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