Research and Development
One of the cornerstones of nuclear physics states that the degrees of freedom of non-radioactive nuclei
are accessible only when the involved particles have very high kinetic energy, on the order of MeV, to
overcome the so-called Coulomb barrier. It is believed that at room temperature and atmospheric
pressure, nuclear reactions are not influenced by the environment in which they occur because the
energies involved are orders of magnitude different from thermal energies.
However, over the past 30 years, a large amount of experimental data has been accumulated showing that
nuclei are indeed influenced by thermal, mechanical, electrical, or photonic excitations under
appropriate conditions. The study of this type of phenomena has been called Low Energy Nuclear Reactions
(LENR).
LEDA's goal is to study and explore the conditions that lead to the excitation of nuclear degrees of
freedom without the use of highly energetic particles or radioactive particles.
Nuclear physics has
developed over the past 90 years through the study and exploration of nuclear reactions that essentially
occur in a vacuum, and little attention has been paid to collective effects occurring within condensed
matter, which in some cases can lead to unusual behavior of nuclear matter that has been little studied
so far. Now, major companies including Google, Nissan, Airbus Group, Boeing, and NASA are funding
research and experiments in this field in order to address their long-term energy needs.
Over the past 30 years, a small part of the scientific community has focused on the study of this type
of phenomenology, demonstrating the existence of new types of nuclear interactions apparently in
violation of previous knowledge of nuclear processes.
The apparent contradiction between these results and traditional nuclear physics must be sought in the
different types of interactions involved.
In condensed matter, indeed, there is the possibility that a large number of nuclei behave coherently as
a macroscopic quantum superstructure called a coherent state, whose dynamic behavior may be different
from that associated with the same number of nuclei interacting pairwise independently.
Based on these hypotheses, it becomes possible to imagine that reactions involving the internal
structure of nuclei may occur without, however, having to interact with them violently, i.e., through
bombardment with highly energetic particles.
Through quantum coherence processes treating nuclear matter as a matter wave, new types of reactions can
therefore be obtained in which even the final products, at least in most cases, are not radioactive or
highly energetic particles and therefore non-ionizing and not dangerous to human health.
Through such mechanisms, we can theoretically describe the transformation of nuclear processes into heat
as observed effectively in the abundant number of LENR experiments, since a single nuclear reaction
occurring in the crystalline structure can share the energy produced with a very large number of
particles belonging to the structure and each of which receives a small fraction of the reaction energy,
which in turn is dissipated as heat.
More specifically, we have developed a theory based on quantum coherence capable of describing at least
one type of nuclear process that can be activated using thermodynamic cycles on a metal powder highly
loaded with hydrogen, and we can predict that the rate of production of ultra-cold neutrons resulting
from it is sufficiently high to be experimentally detected. It is important to note also that these
ultra-cold neutrons, having extremely low kinetic energy, do not naturally escape from the metal
lattice.
