Topic: Rusi Taleyarkhan

Rusi P. Taleyarkhan is a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University since 2003. Prior to that, he was on staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1977 and MS and PhD (Nuclear Engineering and Science) degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 1978 and 1982 respectively. He also holds an MBA (Business Administration) from RPI. He was judged guilty of research misconduct for "falsification of the research record" by a Purdue review board in July, 2008.

In 2002, while a senior scientist at ORNL, Taleyarkhan published a paper on fusion achieved by bombarding a container of liquid solvent with strong ultrasonic vibrations, a process known as sonofusion or bubble fusion. In theory, the vibrations collapsed gas bubbles in the solvent, heating them to temperatures high enough to fuse hydrogen atoms and release energy. Following his move from Oak Ridge to Purdue in 2003, Taleyarkhan published additional papers about his research in this area.

Numerous other scientists, however, were not able to replicate Taleyarkhan's work, including published articles in Phys. Rev. Lett. from the University of Gottingen, from UCLA, from University of Illinois, and from former colleagues at Oak Ridge National Labs.