Materials-Driven Fusion: Metals Boost Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions
US researchers at UC Davis and Berkeley Lab found that surrounding host metals can dramatically boost low-energy deuterium fusion, with fusion rates plateauing below 2.5 keV and, in some samples, increasing by up to a quintillion-fold versus vacuum; the effect is attributed to electrons and structural defects in the host metal shielding Coulomb repulsion, opening a new materials-driven approach to fusion and potentially enabling compact neutron generators and new modeling tools like DuctGPT.