Fleischmann and Pons, "Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium" (1989)

Summary

The paper itself — the one the March 23, 1989 press conference preceded. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons's report of claimed excess enthalpy and nuclear products from the electrolysis of heavy water at a palladium cathode, published in the April 1989 issue of the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial Electrochemistry.

The wiki holds this page for a specific reason. The Utah page's whole subject is a claim announced ahead of the literature; the literature record is the fixed point against which the announcement, the replication failures, and the retraction of confidence are all measured. Citing the press coverage without the paper leaves the object of the controversy uncited.

Useful Claims

• The paper of record is Fleischmann, M., and Pons, S., "Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium", Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial Electrochemistry, vol. 261, no. 2, pp. 301–308, April 1989. DOI 10.1016/0022-0728(89)80006-3.
• Authorship is two names in this order: Fleischmann first, Pons second. Both are on the paper; the announcement and the paper are not different claimants.
• The publication date establishes the ordering the fact page turns on: the March 23, 1989 press conference came before this April 1989 issue.
• Crossref records the paper as cited more than a thousand times, which is consistent with the fact page's framing — the episode's durable footprint is the literature about the claim, not the claim.
• The paper carries a short reference list of six items, two of them the authors' own unpublished or unsubmitted work. It is a preliminary note, not a full experimental report.

Reliability Notes

Primary tier by type, and this is the case where the tier needs the most care. peer-reviewed means the venue, not the verdict. The claims in this paper did not survive replication, and citing it as primary evidence establishes that the claim was made, by whom, where, and when — never that the claim is true. Any page citing it must say which it means.

The paper is also the textbook instance of why review is not proof: it was published, and it was wrong. What followed it was an extensive replication literature that did not confirm the excess heat under controlled conditions; the fact page carries that consensus and cites it separately.

Confidence here is Medium rather than High, following the corpus's practice for papers whose text has not been retrieved. Elsevier's copy is paywalled, so nothing above is quoted from the article body and no experimental figure — no cell current, no excess-power number, no neutron count — is asserted on this page. Do not add one from memory or from a secondary summary. The bibliographic facts above come from the Crossref record for the DOI.

Related Pages

• Pons and Fleischmann Cold Fusion Announcement