Stanley Pons

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Stanley Pons

Stanley Pons (born in 1943, Valdese, North Carolina) is an electrochemist best known for his work with Martin Fleischmann on cold fusion in the 1980s and '90s. The two met while Pons was a graduate student in Professor Alan Bewick's group at the University of Southampton where he earned his PhD in 1978.

On March 23, 1989, while Pons was the chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, he and Fleischmann announced the experimental production of "N-Fusion" ^[1] which was quickly labeled by the press as cold fusion -- a result previously thought to be unattainable. After a short period of public acclaim, the pair were attacked widely for sloppy, irreproducible research and inaccurate results, even after many groups claimed to have reproduced their work, and some positive replications were published in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals, but reviews by the US Department of Energy consider the claims to be unconvincing. Pons moved to France in 1992, along with Fleischmann, to work at the IMRA laboratory (part of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota). The pair parted ways in 1995. As of 1999, Pons was living in southern France. According to a report of the history of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, as of 2000 he is no longer doing research in France.