Evoking echoes of the cold fusion fiasco more than a decade ago, Purdue University said Wednesday that it was reviewing the work of physicist Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, who claims to have developed technology to achieve tabletop fusion.
Purdue's announcement came as the journal Nature released findings Wednesday from its investigation of Taleyarkhan's widely publicized claim and as a UCLA researcher challenged Taleyarkhan's report that he had detected fusion byproducts in a key experiment.
Taleyarkhan expressed confidence that Purdue's review would vindicate his claims, but other researchers said the evidence was likely to be a death knell for the controversial technology, which proponents had claimed would eventually become a major energy source.
It now appears that the technology Taleyarkhan and others proudly call "star in a jar" is probably no more than a flash in the pan.
Taleyarkhan has been "negligent or jumped the gun or concocted data -- one of those -- and has distracted us from a serious problem at the frontiers of research," said UCLA physicist Seth J. Putterman, who has tried to replicate the research for four years. Taleyarkhan's three major papers about his research "are all wrong, in my opinion."
Added retired physicist Michael J. Saltmarsh, who was assigned by the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to check out Taleyarkhan's initial report of the technology: "It was very sloppy experimental work, and I simply don't believe it.... All of his papers are internally inconsistent, and they don't really make sense."
The episode has parallels to the 1989 announcement by two Utah researchers, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that they had created fusion at room temperature by forcing deuterium into special electrodes with an electrical current. Their findings were never replicated.
Taleyarkhan's claims, first made in 2002, have drawn wide public attention because, unlike cold fusion, they are undergirded by a sound physical theory relating to a technique called sonoluminescence that has been studied for a quarter of a century.
Researchers such as Putterman and chemist Kenneth S. Suslick of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have shown that focusing sound waves on a liquid will collapse bubbles, creating very high concentrations of energy.
That technology has found a wide range of applications, including catalyzing chemical reactions, cleaning badly contaminated surfaces and melting fat during liposuction.
