Prior to the of discovery of high-temperature superconducting materials, and also "cold fusion" a new class of materials was discovered called "heavy electron metals", yet as fate would have it . the implications were almost forgotten when HTSC came along - at much higher transition temperatures. Since no one connected heavy electron metals to LENR there was no reason to investigate them in that role.
Here is an article from the time period: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v320/n6058/abs/320124a0.html Abstract: A new class of metals has been found in which the electrons have effective masses orders of magnitude larger than the free-electron mass. Some of these metals are superconducting at low temperatures. This superconductivity seems to be unconventional, with an underlying mechanism different from that in all other known superconductors. Now "orders of magnitude larger" will put these electrons into the range of muon mass (207x). And as you may have guessed, the relevance of these kinds of electrons for us may relate to previous speculation about the possibility of "substitute muons" as a valid approach to what may one day become a new branch of LENR. Yes - this would be "very cold fusion" but that is not really a problem for practical use if the energy gain is there. It simply relates to how to engineer the energy conversion system. It had already been noticed in the early eighties that a superconducting material called 'uranium ruthenium silicate' when cooled to temperatures below 55 degrees K, had its specific heat increased anomalously. This was attributed to the heavy fermions and also related to superconductive properties. The key point for combine it all into a new approach to LENR being of course - uranium itself, and the fact that early on in LENR, uranium was claimed to be a good matrix for the fusion reaction - especially since in practice there would be every reason to suspect that one could engineer fusion --> fission from the host material and get a massive boost in net gain. As mentioned, muon catalyzed fusion would elegantly solve many tough problems for LENR ... IF there were a ready source of muons, which there is not. However, there could be two classes of long-lived "muon substitutes" which could be the equivalent mass of a muon or even more but stable at low temperature. Earlier, it was mentioned that "composite fermions" of the type related to the fractional quantum Hall effect - FQHE might fill the bill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fqhe Now we have another avenue - possibly - by way of either the heavy fermion (electron) or the composite fermion (electron) when they can catalyze fusion. Jones
