ANY attempt to achieve fusion in a bubble of acetone, proposed earlier this year in a controversial paper in Science, would be doomed to failure according to an analysis in Nature this week (vol 418, p 394).
When a tiny bubble collapses quickly it generates a huge amount of heat. Some researchers believe that when a perfectly round bubble collapses it could reach the millions of degrees required for nuclear fusion (New 杏吧原创, 9 March, p 4).
But Yuri Didenko and Kenneth Suslick from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign show that chemical reactions happening inside the bubble suck up most of the energy and limit the temperature. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think you can get beyond 15,000 or 20,000 degrees,鈥� says Suslick.
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However, he does think that bubbles in liquids with low vapour pressure, like liquid metal, might get hot enough for fusion: 鈥淚t鈥檚 a very long shot, but possible.鈥�