> Orders of magnitude variation in phonon energy is a thing though You can do the basic statistics of waves in the open ocean and show that waves will never get

> Orders of magnitude variation in phonon energy is a thing though You can do the basic statistics of waves in the open ocean and show that waves will never get high enough to crest an oil rig in the North Sea. Then go search for "rogue waves" on YouTube and watch it actually happen. Not at that scale. 10m waves are common. 5 orders of magnitudes from this is not a rogue wave, it’s a wave that goes higher than the moon. I understand you are convinced you had a bright new idea, but if you want others to be convinced as well you need more solid arguments than “it could happen”. Again, the kind of stresses at the atomic scale in materials are a few GPa. You need much more than that, on top of a few million kelvins to have deuterium fusion (hydrogen is even harder). > So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions. We really should not, after just basic napkin maths. The energy given by 1 GPa is around 0.001 eV. The energy barrier for a deuterium-tritium reaction is 0.1 MeV. The difference is not an order of magnitude or two; it’s 8. It is just not going to happen in anything that looks like a solid, which is exactly why we do it in confined plasmas. But even if we take this for granted and think a bit about the consequences it gets even more absurd. The same deuterium-tritium fusion reaction releases 17 MeV. This is going to first, melt the crystal close to where the reaction is taking place; and the shred the structure of the material over centimetres. > It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious. Or rather, it would be a freak occurrence if it were happening. The likelihood of this being in the same realm as a wave putting some water on the surface of the moon. > But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result. You don’t need very sensitive equipment to see the damage caused by 17 MeV neutrons in a crystalline material. Fairly standard electron microscopes are enough.