Sveinn Ólafsson on the Cold Fusion Now! podcast

Dr. Sveinn Ólafsson is the guest on the Cold Fusion Now! podcast with Ruby Carat. Dr. Ólafsson works with a form of Rydberg matter called ultra-dense hydrogen which could be related to the cold fusion/LENR reaction.


Listen to the Cold Fusion Now! podcast with Dr. Sveinn Ólafsson on the Podcast page.


Dr. Ólafsson received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University and is currently a research professor at the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences at University of Iceland. He had a career in hydrogen storage before Andrea Rossi sparked his interest in cold fusion.

“In the evenings, I just started to read”, says Dr. Ólafsson, “and I googled, by chance, ‘dense hydrogen‘, and up came Leif Holmlid. ”

He describes how Dr. Leif Holmlid was researching Rydberg matter and discovered a new state of “ultra-dense hydrogen”.

“What was so intriguing was the short distance between two protons that he claimed. I started contact with him shortly after that, and that is the start of any experimental work I have done in this field.”

“He’s been the only guy doing this, except with a few graduate students initially, but he retired a few years ago. Since then, he has been alone, and after I contacted him, there was two of us then in the beginning, and then Sindre came later.”

Drs. Sveinn Olafsson (L) and Leif Holmlid (R). Photo from Experimental Techniques for Studying Rydberg Matter of Hydrogen by Sveinn Olafsson from the 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT

He uses a very common techniques which is time of flight spectroscopy, or sometimes time of flight mass spectroscopy. This is widely used in all kinds of chemistry experiments. “

“What is different here, is that Leif has a different production unit of ions – or sample – which he is studying. So he was initially just interested in the Rydberg states of atoms, and this whole time, he has been improving techniques to study that.”

“And by chance he noticed that the time of flight was too short, actually, so that started the ultra-dense hydrogen.”

In time of flight, he is referring to is the time it takes a particle from the sample region to be ejected and travel down a tube to a detector some distance away after being stimulated by a laser. Dr. Ólafsson explains the process.

“What the laser is doing, since it has wavelength of say 1 micron, it’s actually letting zillions of electrons and protons to oscillate. So it’s joggling something there, and these millions of particles somehow react and something flies out.”

Time of Flight Set-up. Slide from Experimental Techniques for Studying Rydberg Matter of Hydrogen by Sveinn Olafsson from the 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT.

“The time-of flight is measured initially in the normal state of hydrogen Rydberg matter. When the laser breaks up these clusters, the individual atoms travel apart because of the positive charges. Some times of flight are so short, that the energy, or the closeness of these two entities, is so close, they would have to be 2.3 picometers apart initially – that is the ultra-dense state.”

“But also at the same time, you can see they were close at normal chemical distances also. So you can see both the normal state and the dense state using the same instrument. What is different is that in one case you’re having time of flight in microseconds, and the next you have time of flight in nanoseconds, or that range.”

“Time of flight is a technique used in normal chemistry all the time. You hit it with a laser and these chemical entities fly apart, usually just 5 eV, and that’s it. ”

“Leif is using the energy of 630 eV, which is quite high, and no chemist or physicist will accept that you have such bonding distance, or bonding energy, in any molecule, or any states, because quantum physics says that state is unbound and not stable.”

Leif Holmlid was using higher laser energy stimulation to perform a common experiment, and it turns out that his choice of sample catalyst may have led to the surprising outcome of an ultra-dense state for hydrogen.

Dr. Ólafsson says, “Before that, he had been studying different easy metals like potassium which is easy to study and easy to produce Rydberg states, and I think by chance, he used catalysts that could do similar things to hydrogen as to potassium.”

“Hydrogen has a very high ionization energy compared to potassium and all these alkali metals, so it is very strange that you could make a a Rydberg state of hydrogen just by catalysts.”

“Leif started first with a common catalyst, the one making all this plastic waste that you find in nature now. This catalyst is one the steps of making polyethylene plastics.”

“So there are tens of millions of tons of this catalyst made every years, just to make plastics. But if you put some styrene in, then you’re changing some atoms on that molecule. That catalyst is usually a very hollow material, or nano-porous, so you basically have a huge surface area in the catalyst, which just makes the production better.”

Graphic of Rydberg formation. Slide from Experimental Techniques for Studying Rydberg Matter of Hydrogen by Sveinn Olafsson from the 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT.

“Basically this is a nano-porous surface, and what is probably going on is that hydrogen is adsorbed on that surface, and we’ve been discussing that this is just a special surface where you can prime the hydrogen to have a Rydgberg state as the lowest energy due to the potassium ions which are on the surface also.”

“This is a mixture of ironoxide – rust – and potassium, and it’s well known that when you put oxide surfaces with potassium, the three electrons from potassium forms a kind of electro-gas on top of the surface. “

“So this has never been studied or calculated because it’s very complicated to do it since the orbit of the Rydberg state is huge. It would make the Rydberg atom in a Rydberg state, which has a circular orbit with high quantum numbers – if it is an atom.”

“You can not do that easily to hydrogen, but on the surface, you could make a joint cooperation between the surface and the hydrogen. These may join up on the surface and give us the first states of this process, which is just the normal hydrogen Rydberg matter which is the feeding matter for the ultra-dense state.”

“You have this feedstock which is the normal hydrogen Rydberg matter, and through some excitation, it’s actually more thermodynamically stable to go into the other phase, but not so greatly, so that can obviously form some thin layers on top of metals, and that has been seen in experiments of ultra-dense state, which has so many forms creeping on the surface, and can even live for days if you leave it in the chamber there.”

“It’s actually fairly easy to prove this is true between two protons in a course of quantum physics, and I totally agree on that viewpoint.”

“But nobody knows what you can say if you are trying to do this with, say 15 or 19 particles, because that theory is not so easily solved. It’s not so easy either to say that it is not possible.”

“Most people use the simple way out and say it’s impossible and nonsense, because they are using so simple a model; they are not using multi-particle physics.”

For the ultra-dense state of hydrogen, Dr. Ólafsson says that “it’s always in that range of 2.3 pm. Leif reports that sometimes it’s a little bit less, and sometimes higher. He has given indication that this material has different spin states.”

“The only problem with is that the theory describing it is an empirical model, so it has no support from quantum calculations. It is describing his results, so we can say there are excited states which are a little bit longer distances and so on.”

“Since Leif Holmlid is the only man who has been doing this, we are replicating some parts of his work, but so far, we have not been studying the 2.3 picometer much. We’ve only been studying the ultra-fast breakup, when we have a higher time of flight. It’s not actually a bound state, but it’s actually flying out with much higher energy.”

Slide from Experimental Techniques for Studying Rydberg matter of Hydrogen by Sveinn Olafsson from the 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT

“At the moment we are just trying to catch up with Leif. We have put the labs together, and we are trying to replicate some of his work, because according to him, we are the first experimentalists who have contacted him and tried to replicate things.”

“It’s actually a nice story to tell that I had applied for some money from the Icelandic Research Council here, and the main argument from all the reviewers was that “nothing has been published except him, and, if this were to be true it would possibly be quoted in the highest scientific journals’. So actually it was a catch-22; they believe all these claims are so wonderful, that somebody must have already studied it, but nobody has! It’s not good to be #2 in applying.”

“I managed to get funding, it was from a Technological Development fund. They are less bound to what science is and is not.”

Asked if he thought that ultra-dense hydrogen could be behind the cold fusion reaction, Dr. Ólafsson said that was his original thought when he saw Leif’s research.

“I thought, this is so close, this must be cold fusion. But it is so complicated a behavior, and of course, getting experiments in cold fusion and experiments in Leif’s research, to join up is of course difficult because they’re in different surroundings.”

“When I contacted Leif and asked him if he thought this was possibly behind cold fusion, he was skeptical, and didn’t want to be linked to the cold fusion thing.”

“But I managed to make a simple calculation with this distance of 2.3 picometer and some simple assumption, and it gave me that the rate of this distance could be enough. But it has one problem, because if you have this tunneling mechanism at this distance, like muon-catalyzed fusion, then you should still see the same result. In other words, you should get radioactive neutrons and protons. So these particles trying to tunnel in close to each other, that is not the right physics [for cold fusion].”

“But Rydberg matter and ultra-dense physics gives us the opportunity to study multi-particle interactions. In a sense, it tells us, if there is a link (between LENR and ultra-dense hydrogen), then it’s a multi-particle tunneling or interaction which could be making cold fusion signals.”

“I don’t know any samples without a crack or opening. Foil has cracks and so on, so you don’t know. I think there is nothing denying that ultra-dense hydrogen is in all cold fusion experiments.”

After being schooled in ultra-dense hydrogen production, Ruby asked Dr. Ólafsson how it was working with graduate student Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen in Norway, who received the test reactor from Tadahiko Mizuno last year.

“Well Sindre is not quite so young a student, he’s in his 30s, so that makes the game easier, you could say! Sometimes, he’s the student, and sometimes, I’m the student.”

“Since we are building one lab in Norway, and one lab in Iceland, which is a little bit different lab, he’ll makes something in his lab, and I catch up with that, and I do the same here, vice versa. ”

“And then we are traveling to each other’s lab, and I’ve been here three years already, and a PhD should be over in three years, but we have the problem of wanting to see more, and do more. So we are always joking ‘when will he finish his PhD?’!”

“It’s a nice thing when you have started in a different field, and one day you kind of get bored, when you start doing the same thing over and over again.”

“So the main reason for me to join this field was out of curiosity, and to see what could be done differently from these nickel and palladium-type experiments.”

“And I think along this way, from 2011 to 2019, you read so many different fields, that you are suddenly becoming not an expert, you know something of everything in the end, and that has been the most enjoyable part of this project.”

“But I’ve still been doing a bit of what I’ve always done. Like I have projects at CERN with a large international group, where we meet up once a year and do a well known technique. It’s not cold fusion, but it’s nice.”

“And there’s another project here which I take part in where we try to find catalysts for ammonia production, so it’s a little bit of everything.”

Dr. Ólafsson’s colleagues have followed the journey. He says, “At the moment they’re so used to it – seven years later! They just smile, yeah, yeah, yeah…”

“I gave a talk last week at the Icelandic Physical Society about what is going on in this field here. And my closing words were, ‘If you’re confused, you’re not alone, I’m also confused as you’.”

“I was just presenting experimental facts, and strange ones. ”

“I think scientists are much more open – until they have read the applications – and then they get scared!”

Listen to the Cold Fusion Now! podcast with Dr. Sveinn Ólafsson on the Podcast page.

See Experimental Techniques for Studying Rydberg Matter of Hydrogen by Sveinn Ólafsson from the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT.

Tadahiko Mizuno rewards CMNS community with test reactor

Nuclear chemist and veteran LENR researcher Dr. Tadahiko Mizuno is now in the recovery phase after an earthquake damaged sensitive equipment in his laboratory in Hokkaido, and the CMNS community is assisting in the repair and replacement of lab apparatus that will allow him to continue his successful excess heat research.

“I have experienced earthquakes many times before. Each one was terrible, but this time it was a bit different,” said Dr. Mizuno of the shaking.

“The fact that the laboratory was hurt by the unexpected, the fact that the building was broken – and the biggest thing is that electricity and water stopped for a few days. Earthquakes up to that point did not have that kind of thing, rather it was very localized. This time, the lab would clearly be effected.”

Like many scientists in Japan, Dr. Mizuno had prepared for a disaster like this. He says,

“Naturally, this kind of situation was contemplated. A few years ago Sapporo produced a scenario of a devastating earthquake, with almost all the buildings collapsed. There was no electricity, no water, no food- it was a cold winter game-plan. It was so realistic, it was a revelation to seriously prepare for disaster prevention.”

“We fixed everything that we could install, such as fixing shelves, setting fire extinguishers, emergency food, water, power generation radio. Of course I persuaded others to proceed with preparation. I was warning everyone!”

“A few days before, a metallic ringing continued in my ears, and an earthquake came in the middle of the night when it stopped. No matter how much preparation it was, the damage was something I could not escape.”

The quake on 3/11/11 which caused the ensuing tsunami and Fukushima disaster was foremost in his mind.

“I also had the same experience on March 11, 2011. At that time I took a day off and was vegetating in front of the TV. A loud audible alarm sounded from the TV and mobile phone, and soon a big earthquake swing came. I think everyone is aware of the situation of the subsequent disasters.”

“At that time, I was preparing CF experiments to control the heat. It seems that it was telling me to hurry again this time. I feel such a presence of God.”

Glow discharge makes significant excess power

Dr. Mizuno has been investigating both LENR excess heat and transmutations since 1989. He has written and edited several books, among them, Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion published in 1998, detailing the massive excess heat he witnessed in his earliest experiments, and the slow realization over years that there were also transmutations occurring, too.

Working as Hydrogen Engineering Application & Development HEAD, Dr. Mizuno has been part of the extraordinary collaboration between industry and academia in Japan, recently working with Clean Planet, Inc and the Condensed Matter Nuclear Science CMNS division at the Research Center for Electron Photon Science ELPH at Tohoku University.

Hideki Yoshino, the founder and CEO of Clean Planet and an organizer of collaborative LENR research, reported on Mizuno’s work at the CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT in 2014.

In that presentation, Yoshino described results from 73 tests of Mizuno’s gas discharge system where a treated nickel mesh cathode reacted with D2 gas at temperatures above 200 degrees C and pressures of 100-300 pascals using a palladium rod wrapped in palladium wire as an anode.

ICCF-21 Slide showing glow discharge reactor schematics.

In one test run, a total input power of 80 Watts produced 78 Watts excess thermal power out. Continuing for 35 days before it was turned off, the total excess energy produced was 108 MegaJoules.

The only problem? Reactions would not start sometimes until one, two, even three years later! A new method of preparing the electrodes would have to be found in order to create a reaction more quickly, and explore the parameter space of the system.

From Observation of Excess Heat by Activated Metal and Deuterium Gas by T. Mizuno JCMNS V25
Previously, the nickel mesh and palladium were carefully cleaned and then put to glow discharge, which Mizuno says creates the required nano-particles in the process. In 2017, understanding that the nickel mesh is where the reaction is located, he decided to try applying palladium directly to the nickel beforehand.

In the paper Observation of Excess Heat by Activated Metal and Deuterium Gas published in JCMNS V25 [.pdf], Mizuno writes,

“With unprocessed nickel, it is impossible to generate excess heat at all. However, if the surface is covered with particles and further Pd is present on the surface, excess heat is easily generated. The smaller the particles are, and the more Pd is uniformly present, the more the excess heat is generated.”

A new method treats the nickel by physically rubbing the palladium rod on the mesh before glow discharge begins. A second new method used electroless plating to plate palladium on the nickel mesh.

Mizuno excess power experiment is reproduced

At the 21st International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF-21 held June 2018, Jed Rothwell presented some of the results of experiments using the new methods of electrode preparation.

See the ICCF-21 video presentation on Tadahiko Mizuno’s work here. Download the presentation .pdf file here.

Jed Rothwell runs the LENR science paper archive http://lenr-canr.org/ and is the author of Cold Fusion and the Future [.pdf]. He has translated many of Dr. Mizuno’s papers and books from Japanese into English. Mizuno writes:

“Jed has been involved in our research of CF work for 25 years, from 1993 to 2018. He analyzed our testing methods, our adiabatic thermal measurement method, and our air cooling method test results. He found problems and contributed to many improvements of the test method. Jed himself wrote the manuscript paper and based on these many contributions, Jed is the co-author of that paper.”

He added,

“He has also struggled to collect research funds for us. Without this funding, our CF work may have been impossible.”

The air-flow calorimetry system used by Tadahiko Mizuno from the ICCF-21 presentation (2018).

In the ICCF-21 presentation, Rothwell revealed that the new methods of electrode preparation have successfully decreased the time to reaction to about a week or two, but sadly, the change in materials preparation has reduced power output to only 5-20% of previous values, now measuring about 20-40 Watts excess thermal.

For 38 active tests, 19 using each of the two new methods, all tests but five produced about 5% excess power, with five of those 38 tests producing 15% or more excess thermal power.

There have been valid concerns with his data, and Dr. Mizuno has been responsive. For instance, he showed that the resistance heater is not part of the excess by performing glow discharge with an ordinary nickel mesh (without treatment) and producing only the amount of heat as resistance heating.

It seems addressing the objections has only strengthened the conclusions, as they should.

In fact, a team of scientists Takehiko Itoh, Yasuhiro Iwamura, Jirohta Kasagi from ELPH at Tohoku University and Hiroki Shishido from the Quantum Science and Energy Engineering Department also at Tohoku University, were able to successfully reproduce excess heat using a system almost identical to Mizuno’s, though with less heat output, only generating about 7 Watts thermal. [See Anomalous Excess Heat Generated by the Interaction between Nano-structured Pd/Ni Surface and D2 Gas in JCMNS V24 [.pdf].]

Extrapolating to 700 degrees C should produce 1 kiloWatt. From ICCF-21 presentation file.

Mizuno believes that extrapolating data relating temperature and excess power (here showing the earlier high-output data) to 700 degrees C could produce 1 kiloWatt of excess thermal power, a number Jed Rothwell notes is “much better energy density and Carnot efficiency than a fission reactor core.”

Community generosity is rewarded with test reactor

When the 6.7 earthquake hit Hokkaido on September 6, 2018, damage to the sensitive lab equipment was enough to spell an end to research. At 73 years young, it’s not easy to start over again. Describing the damage to the lab, Dr. Mizuno was optimistic about repairs saying,

“Although the shelf did not collapse, inside the lab was knocked-about. The SEM, the fluorescent X-ray equipment, and the experimental equipment which had just been installed, moved around as much as 10 cm, and the connections and vacuum were destroyed.”

“Fortunately, there is a lot of experience around able to repair the equipment, and we can fix some too, if we can make the time.

The CMNS community came together to help. Physicist and LENR scientist Dr. Dennis Cravens started a gofundme fundraiser to help with costs:

“Do unto others. If Tadahiko is correct, it is a promising path that he should continue to follow. He had been working alone without encouragement for years – and there were many years early on with no results. I know how that must feel- being alone and unappreciated. I have had many years like that.”

“We raised about $8,500 dollars. The amount sent was lightly adjusted by Go Fund Me fees and currency exchange costs getting it here to there. I should also say a few people wired money directly.”

That generosity will stretch a long way to fix the equipment, and spirits. Upon hearing of the campaign, Mizuno was overcome:

“I am very thankful to everyone for helping me. I thought for a long time that I was studying CF work all alone. I thought it was checkmate due to the earthquake damage on 6th September. I was pessimistic that I could not repair the equipment, and all was over. However, that was not so. Many friends have stepped up and supported my CF research. I was so happy, tears came to my eyes. This was the first time I have felt this way during the more than 70 years I have been alive. I am very happy that people were so kind, and am happy thinking about it. I am very grateful to everyone. I will never forget the efforts of my friends.”

Dr. Mizuno wanted to do something special and so he offered up one of his reactors to a researcher in the community to test.

Small thank-you reactor by Mizuno from Lenr-forum.

“The money you raised will be used to repair my equipment, especially the scanning electron microscope, and, part of the money will be used for the production cost of a small reactor that I am sending to another lab that has agreed to test it. I think it will produce excess heat. And I think that other researchers in the world will confirm and announce excess heat generation by these methods. Thank you again.”

Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen is Director of Operations of Norrønt AS, a company providing engineering project management and patent development. He is also a PhD candidate in Physics who has been researching ultra-dense hydrogen and Rydberg matter with PhD supervisor Svein Olafsson in Iceland and Norway’s Professor Svein Holmlid.

Zeiner-Gundersen, based in the Oslo-area of Norway, has just received the reactor from Mizuno.

“I’m guessing I was one of the first to contact Mizuno after his lab went down in the earthquake, to continue and verify his important work, and I’m also working in a well equipped lab as well. Opening the shipping box was like Christmas. All the excitement in the world.”

“I believe its not the glow discharge reactor but filled with ZrPd powder that will activate when the temperature reaches a critical point after being loaded with deuterium. I think this is the same design that yielded 12% excess heat that Jed presented at ICCF21.”

“I’m still waiting for further operating instructions before testing and I’m setting up flow calorimetry, and programming Labview data acquisition to measure everything from: voltage, current, 8 temp sensors, pressure, charged particles, alfa, beta, gamma and neutrons.”

The CMNS community, long isolated from mainstream support, knows that working together is the path to success. Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen maintains

“… the most valuable work we as researchers can do is to collaborate, share data, replicate and verify the work preformed by the best researchers in this field.”

After 30-years of breakthrough research, Tadahiko Mizuno is just getting started. He’s organizing the lab again for a new round of experiments and consulting on a reproduction half-way around the world. When asked if he will be able to build upon such spectacular results he says:

“It is all about making an excess-heat generation CF device. There is no reason not to be able to do it. This is my job.”

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