Purdue investigates scientist over 'cold fusion' claims

WASHINGTON -- Purdue University is investigating complaints about a scientist who claimed to have achieved ''cold fusion" using sound waves to make bubbles in a test tube, the Indiana university said yesterday.

The work of nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan has been controversial since he published a study in 2002 claiming to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy production -- nuclear fusion at room temperature. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun.

If scientists can duplicate the results and harness the technology, tabletop fusion has the potential to provide an almost limitless source of cheap energy.

Taleyarkhan, whose study was published while he was at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, now works at Purdue and has also been trying to replicate his earlier findings. He claimed to have done so in 2004.

Purdue's provost, Sally Mason, said the university, in response to complaints by co-workers, last week initiated a review of his research. ''The research claims involved are very significant and the concerns expressed are extremely serious," she said in a statement. ''Purdue will explore all aspects of the situation thoroughly and announce the results at the appropriate time."

The journal Nature reported yesterday that it had interviewed several of Taleyarkhan's colleagues who suspect something is amiss.

''Faculty members Lefteri Tsoukalas and Tatjana Jevremovic, along with several others who do not wish to be named, say that since Taleyarkhan began working at Purdue, he has removed the equipment with which they were trying to replicate his work, claimed as 'positive' experimental runs for which they never saw the raw data, and opposed the publication of their own negative results," Nature said in a statement.

''In addition, Brian Naranjo at the University of California, Los Angeles, is submitting to Physical Review Letters an analysis of Taleyarkhan's recently published data that strongly suggests he has detected not fusion, but a standard lab source of radioactivity."

Engineers and physicists have been cautious about Taleyarkhan's technique but say in theory it could work.