In March 2002, the scientific world was rocked by a shocking news: a distinguished U.S. government scientist said he had made nuclear fusion of sound waves in his laboratory. Advance Taleyarkhan was important news, because nuclear fusion is one of the most difficult scientific processes, and also one of the most coveted. You could solve all our energy problems forever. In principle, there is enough fuel on earth to provide clean, pollution-free energy of billions of people for millions of years.
For this to occur, the individual atoms must be slammed into each other with enough energy to merging, which requires temperatures found only in the core of stars like our sun – over 10 million degrees Kelvin . The idea that these temperatures reached in a laboratory scale, using sound waves not only came as a surprise to many scientists. For them, the merger was huge projects billions of pounds, intergovernmental schemes, in order to produce energy far in time decades.
Taleyarkhan advance fusion is based on a poorly understood process called sonoluminescence. It is a process that magically transforms sound waves into flashes of light, focusing the sound energy in a small flicker inside a bubble. It has been called the star in a jar. The star in a jar effortlessly reaches temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees hotter than the sun’s surface. Many scientists have wondered if the core of the bubble was even hotter – maybe even as hot as the sun’s core. If so, the merger would happen there.
But until Taleyarkhan, nobody had been able to either prove or disprove it.
