It is three years since Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan made the controversial claim that he had achieved one of the holy grails of science - nuclear fusion. Since then, he has grown tired of the scepticism of his fellow scientists. "My lab has been audited, my instruments have been audited, my books have been audited, the data speaks for itself. "The data has to speak for itself - I mean how can I answer that I know absolutely 100% sure that it is what I think it is? I just have to look at the data and the data have been looked at very carefully. "In the history of publication I probably will not be able to find one that has gone through this level of scrutiny - if you do, let me know," he said. Nuclear fusion is nature's atomic power - it is what powers the Sun and, if it can be made to happen here on Earth on a large enough scale, it promises to solve all of mankind's energy problems in one go. It would be clean, last for ever and create no long-term nuclear waste. And Rusi Taleyarkhan claims to have achieved it using simple sound waves. His breakthrough is based on something called sonoluminescence. It is a process that transforms sound waves into flashes of light, focusing the sound energy into a tiny flickering hot spot inside a bubble. It has been nicknamed "the star in a jar" by researchers in the field. The star in a jar effortlessly reaches temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, which is hotter than the surface of the Sun. It was able to do all this by simply focussing the energy of the sound wave into a tiny hot spot. In order to get fusion, temperatures inside the bubble had to be in the region of 10 million degrees. It seemed improbable that the tiny hot spots could be this hot. But if they were - or if a way could be found to make them so - then a new route to nuclear fusion would be opened up. In 1999, the US government made some research funds available and across America a few laboratories started to explore ways to try to turn their star in a jar into fusion. And Rusi Taleyarkhan got there first.
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