It is doubtful that there can be a useful USPTO survey on this topic, since no competent attorney these days would use the phrase "cold fusion" in a disclosure. A case in point is Ahern's application. The title is: "Amplification of Energetic Reactions in Metal Nanoparticles".
It does not mention cold fusion, and more importantly, Ahern does NOT believe that nuclear fusion is involved in LENR anyway, but essentially the application has been held up for the reason that the examiner believes it applies to cold fusion. In fact the examiner himself cited the Ben Breed application, which is also in litigation. "Low temperature fusion" US 20090122940 A1 I think Ahern's application will go through eventually, and possibly Breed as well - and that the examiner could be reprimanded for overreaching- but that is because the filing was carefully crafted NOT to mention the P&F or cold fusion, and because Ahern believes that the energy comes from a non-nuclear source. However, this kind of challenge by an examiner is costly to pursue. BTW R. Ben Breed was formerly with Raytheon and Hughes (as best I can tell) so he is no lightweight . and he may have an IP ace in the hole. From: Kevin O'Malley Jed: I'm starting to run into folks who think it's crazy to assert that the USPTO won't issue cold fusion patents. Is there a good LENR patent office survey paper you would recommend? On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: Kevin O'Malley <[email protected]> wrote: ***That reminds me. One thing I keep running into is how many articles and replications have been published in peer-reviewed journals? And skeptics do not consider the Journal of Nuclear Physics to be a "real" peer reviewed journal. Does LENR-CANR.org have these subcategorized somehow? No, but Britz does. See: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf - Jed
