No, this has absolutely nothing to do with so-called "cold" fusion. Cold fusion was a hypothetical type of room-temperature nuclear fusion. It was reported in 1989 but not successfully replicated. It can't possibly work because of the Coulomb repulsion between nuclei is far too strong for them to come into contact at our everyday energy levels.
This work is related to actual genuine nuclear fusion, the kind that occurs at energy scales sufficient to overcome that Coulomb barrier. At those energy scales it becomes very hard to manage the plasma in which fusion occurs. This is a claimed advance in plasma management.
Ordinary fusion doesn't overcome the Coulomb barrier either. In a purely classical sense, fusion wouldn't happen, since the thermal energies are well below the height of the Coulomb barrier.
What happens is that thermal energies get high enough that the nuclei get close enough to have a significant rate of tunneling through the barrier. It's a quantum mechanical effect.
There is a nonzero rate of tunneling through the barrier even at room temperature -- just extremely low, far lower than putative cold fusion claims.
> It can't possibly work because of the Coulomb repulsion between nuclei is far too strong for them to come into contact at our everyday energy levels.
Worth noting that (while obviously not what is normally meant by "cold fusion") muon-catalyzed fusion is possible and is cold, so the above statement can't be quite right.
Technically correct, yes, but muonic atoms have a lifetime on the order of microseconds. They aren't really relevant to the everyday-scale physics I was discussing.
There is however Lattice Confinement Fusion [1] which claims to overcome the Coulomb barrier through some kind of "screening" from the electron cloud in the lattice. That seems more like it would work on at everyday scales, though I don't understand it nearly enough to offer any opinion on viability.
> Technically correct, yes, but muonic atoms have a lifetime on the order of microseconds. They aren't really relevant to the everyday-scale physics I was discussing.
But they're relevant to the particular argument you were making, which involved only the nuclei and not what was orbiting them. Unless I'm misunderstanding?
> There is however Lattice Confinement Fusion [1] which claims to overcome the Coulomb barrier through some kind of "screening" from the electron cloud in the lattice. That seems more like it would work on at everyday scales, though I don't understand it nearly enough to offer any opinion on viability.
Lattice confinement fusion is generally considered to be crankery, as I understand it. It's what Pons and Fleischmann were doing. There are various people who have continued work on it but my understanding is that basically none of it is credible.
True...but without an extremely cheap source of muons (half-life: 2 microseconds), muon-catalyzed fusion will forever be condemned to "in theory, you could..." purgatory.
This work is related to actual genuine nuclear fusion, the kind that occurs at energy scales sufficient to overcome that Coulomb barrier. At those energy scales it becomes very hard to manage the plasma in which fusion occurs. This is a claimed advance in plasma management.