Peter Hagelstein

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Peter L. Hagelstein (born July 31, 1954 in Inglewood ) is an American theoretical physicist and electrical engineer .

Hagelstein studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received his master's degree in 1976 and his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1981. From 1981 to 1985 he was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , where he was involved in the development of nuclear-ignited X-ray lasers for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) for missile defense in space, which was then heavily sponsored by President Ronald Reagan . For this he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize in 1984 . In 1986 he was back at MIT in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he is now an Associate Professor in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Today he is mainly concerned with mechanisms for converting thermal energy into electrical energy in semiconductors, for which he and others introduced the concept of the “thermal diode ” in 2001 .

In 1985 he was part of a group that successfully demonstrated stimulated emission ( laser operation ) in the soft X-ray region at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory . Together with Szymon Suckewer's group in Princeton, they were the first to succeed in demonstrating laser operation in the (soft) X-ray range. He was also involved in the development of table top X-ray lasers.

Hagelstein has also been active in cold fusion research since 1989 . At that time he submitted several patents based on a theory he had developed of the observation of excess heat production in palladium-deuterium electrolysis cells, which was claimed by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the time . Although the results of Fleischmann and Pons, which attracted a lot of attention at the time , were strongly doubted , for example in a DOE report from 1989, further research is being carried out in the field. In 2003, Hagelstein organized the 10th Conference on Cold Fusion and suggested a new evaluation of the research results by the DOE, which took place in 2004, but in the majority opinion did not establish any significant progress compared to the status of 1989.

Hagelstein dealt mainly theoretically, but also experimentally for decades with experiments of the Fleischmann-Pons type on cold fusion. He carried out demonstration experiments at MIT and investigated various aspects of these experiments, most recently the problem of why the high-energy reaction products (neutrons, gamma radiation, etc.) actually expected in fusion reactions - in an amount sufficient to explain the observed excess energy - in the No experiments. To this end, he investigated simplified theoretical models ( spin boson model ) in order to model a division and dissipation of the large amount of energy released in a single fusion of two deuterium nuclei to helium (around 24 MeV) into numerous smaller energy quanta by coupling to the crystal lattice of the palladium ions (transfer on phonons of the lattice). In an essay in the natural sciences in 2010, he showed that there are great experimental restrictions for the sometimes discussed possibility that the usual nuclear fusion reactions would initially take place inside the cathode with a helium nucleus of high kinetic energy as the reaction product, which would then somehow be slowed down inside the cathode without to make itself noticeable to the outside through high-energy secondary radiation.

literature

  • Hagelstein, Stephen Senturia, Terry Orlando: Introductory applied quantum and statistical mechanics . Wiley, Interscience, 2004, ISBN 0-471-20276-2
  • Editor with Jorge G. Rocca Soft X-ray lasers and applications , Proc. SPIE, vol. 2520, 1995

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ DL Matthews et al.: Demonstration of a Soft X-Ray Amplifier . In: Physical Review Letters . tape 54 , no. 2 , January 14, 1985, p. 110-113 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.54.110 .
  2. ↑ Interview with Hagelstein, March 2010 , also on his assessment of the general research situation in the USA
  3. ↑ Peter L. Hagelstein: Constraints on energetic particles in the Fleischmann – Pons experiment . In: Natural Sciences . tape 97 , no. 4 , April 2010, p. 345-352 , doi : 10.1007 / s00114-009-0644-4 . Hagelstein's essays can be found here: Theory page on Hagelstein at New Energy Times
personal data
SURNAME Hagelstein, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hagelstein, Peter L.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American electrical engineer and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Inglewood