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Nuclear fusion
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Home »<br>Particle and nuclear » Nuclear fusion » Nuclear fusion persists at ultralow energies inside metal foils
Nuclear fusion
Research update
Nuclear fusion persists at ultralow energies inside metal foils
03 Aug 2026 Andrey Feldman
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Foil fusion Jeremy Munday (left) and Micah Karahadian stand next to the experimental setup at UC Davis. (Courtesy: Marina Leite/UC Davis)">
Foil fusion Jeremy Munday (left) and Micah Karahadian stand next to the experimental setup at UC Davis. (Courtesy: Marina Leite/UC Davis)
Deuterium nuclei fired into thin foils of palladium and titanium keep fusing when the nuclei’s incident energies are reduced to the level where the process should be all but extinguished. Instead, physicists in the US have found that as the incident energy is reduced, the fusion rate plateaus – even at the lowest energies probed. Indeed, the low-energy fusion rate exceeds predictions for isolated nuclei by more than 1018. While significant, the enhanced fusion rates remain far too small for energy generation.
The results suggest that a metal’s electrons and internal defects can influence how fusion occurs, according to the researchers at the University of California, Davis and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Nuclear fusion powers the stars, but here on Earth it has so far been impossible to create a practical fusion reactor that delivers usable energy to the electricity grid
"Fusion is hard in the laboratory because positive nuclei repel each other," explains team member Thomas Schenkel at Berkeley. Quantum mechanics offers a loophole – nuclei can tunnel through the repulsive barrier without having enough kinetic energy to overcome it. However, the tunnelling probability is very small at low energies.
Not fade away
Physicists measure these nuclear collision energies in kiloelectronvolts (keV). Today’s fusion reactors tend to operate plasmas at temperatures that correspond to collision energies of about 10 keV. Below that, reactions fade away, and earlier experiments showed that fusion pretty well stopped near 5 keV.
Yet a solid is a very different environment to a plasma. "Metal lattices contain electrons, defects, and locally concentrated deuterium, all of which can combine to create reaction environments that do not exist in a conventional plasma," says Jeremy Munday who along with Micah Karahadian is based at UC Davis . The metal’s electron cloud partly shields the repulsion between nuclei, letting them approach more closely. This "screening" effect has been studied since the 1990s and is still not fully understood. The field also carries the scars of the 1989 cold-fusion debacle, during which experiments reporting enhanced fusion...