Peter L. Hagelstein

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 in 1976 he took his master's degree in 1981 and his doctorate in electrical engineering. From 1981 to 1985 he was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was involved in the development of nuclear ignition X-ray lasers, which were meant for President Ronald Reagan at the time strongly supported the Strategic Defense Initiative ( SDI) for missile defense in space. For this he received the 1984 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. In 1986, he was back at MIT in the Department of Electrical and computer science, where he is today in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE ) Associate Professor. He now mainly deals with mechanisms for converting thermal energy into electrical energy in semiconductors, for which he and others in 2001, the concept of " thermal diode " imagined.

In 1985, he belonged to a group that successfully stimulated at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory emission ( lasing ) demonstrated in the soft X-ray range. Together with the group of Szymon Suckewer in Princeton they succeeded thus the first demonstration of laser operation in the ( soft ) X-rays. Also at the development towards table top X-ray lasers he was involved.

Hagelstein has also been active since 1989 in research on cold fusion. At the time he filed because he developed a theory of that time claimed by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons observation of excess heat production in palladium -deuterium electrolysis cells, a number of patents. Although the results of Fleischmann and Pons, which at that time attracted much attention, for example, were in a DOE report in 1989 strongly doubted, research is continuing in the area. 2003 organized Hagelstein 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 no substantial progress towards the 1989 level noted.

Hagelstein dealing mainly theoretically, but also experimentally for decades with experiments by Fleischmann -Pons type of cold fusion. He led at MIT demonstration experiments from it, and looked at various aspects of these experiments, in recent times, especially the problem of why the in fusion reactions actually expected high-energy reaction products (neutrons, gamma radiation, and others) - in an amount sufficient to explain the observed excess amount of energy - absent in the experiments. He included simplified theoretical models (spin- boson model) to a sharing and transfer of in a single fusion of two deuterium nuclei released into helium large amount of energy ( around 24 MeV) into numerous smaller energy quanta by coupling to the crystal lattice of palladium ions to model ( transmission phonons to the grating). In an essay in the natural sciences in 2010, he showed that experimentally major restrictions exist for the sometimes discussed possibility that within the cathode initially the usual nuclear fusion reactions would proceed with a helium nucleus kinetic energy as the reaction product, which would then somehow slowed down within the cathode without to make by high-energy secondary radiation to the outside noticeable.