A review of experiments reporting non-conventional phenomena in nuclear matter aiming at identifying common features in view of possible interpretation

TL;DR

This paper reviews decades of experimental results on non-conventional phenomena in nuclear matter, aiming to identify common features and interpret these unexpected findings despite reproducibility challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of 20 experiments reporting unexpected nuclear phenomena, highlighting common features and proposing an integral interpretative approach.

Findings

Identification of common features across experiments

Classification of unexpected nuclear phenomena

Discussion on reproducibility issues

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to clarify, as far as it is possible, the overall picture of experimental results in the field of non-conventional phenomena in nuclear matter published in scientific literature, accumulated in the last decades and still missing a widely accepted interpretation. While completeness of the collection of the experiments is not among the aims of the effort, focus is put on adopting a more comprehensive and integral approach through the analysis of the different experimental layouts and the different results, searching for common features and analogous factual outcomes in order to obtain a consistent reading of a lot of experimental evidences that appear, until now, lacking a classification in a logic catalogue which might be compared to a sort of building and not to a collection of single stones. Particular attention is put on the issue of reproducibility of experiments and on the reasons why such a limitation is a frequent characteristic of many experimental activities reported in published papers. This approach is innovative as compared with those already available in the scientific literature. In a synoptical table a comprehensive classification is given of the twenty experiments examined in terms of type of evidences that are ascertained by the experimenters in their published papers but are unexpected according to well established physical theories. Examples of such unexpected evidences (named also non-conventional or weird) are: excess heat generation, isotope production, reduction of radioactivity levels, and production of neutrons or alpha particles.