A Taleyarkhan Skeptic Makes His Case

Sonofusion researcher Seth Putterman, a longtime researcher into acoustic cavitation and an early pioneer of sonofusion work himself, counts himself among the skeptics of Rusi Taleyarkhan's work. Putterman ran an experiment for the BBC to test whether Taleyarkhan's most recent claims made sense:

Working from the instructions set out in Rusi Taleyarkhan's paper, it assembled the same key scientific conditions necessary to create nuclear fusion from sonoluminescence.

But to see if it could find fusion, we measured the neutrons and the flashes of light simultaneously with nanosecond accuracy, something that had never been done before.

Recording data nanosecond by nanosecond, Seth Putterman did not find a single neutron close enough to a flash of light for it to be considered the result of nuclear fusion. So the conclusion was negative.

Unfortunately, it looks like Taleyarkhan has a lot of explaining left to do, and we're no better off than we were two years ago, or ten.