Speaking of Cravens/Letts and the putative effect of laser irradiation on LENR ...
I stumbled on this 10 year old "news" just now, by femto-serendipity (same authors as the "missing proton" story. Hey, 1 MeV acceleration from a short laser pulse ain't bad... never mind that it ain't "cold" either : http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1997/split/pnu311-1.htm Executive summary: high energy ions (up to 1 MeV) can be caused by shooting ultrashort (150 fsec) laser pulses at clusters of xenon atoms. NB: these are "clusters" not molecules, and if they were a molecular solid, the acceleration would be 1000 times less! so where is the energy coming from ??? EXPLOSIONS OF ATOM CLUSTERS YIELD HIGH ENERGIES . Femtosecond lasers can be used to convert chemical energy into kinetic energy with great pyrotechnic effect. For example, they can blow up molecules, imparting a kinetic energy of 100 eV to individual outgoing ions. Aiming fsec pulses at a solid can produce ions with keV energies. Now scientists at Imperial College (London) have observed much higher energy ions (up to 1 MeV) flying away from the miniature fireball caused by shooting ultrashort (150 fsec), high-intensity (2 x 1016W/cm2) laser pulses at clusters of xenon atoms. It is not yet understood why clusters explode so much more violently than molecules. The researchers look on their explosions as a novel and modest way of achieving high-temperature plasmas in a gas of clusters. They point to the possibility of tabletop fusion experiments. (T. Ditmire et al., Nature, 6 March 1997.)
