Are there fringe research out there looking at that?

yes there have been a few, over the years and currently. However it is a controversial topic, even within the fringe and conspiracy circles - it's often pushed to the fringe of the fringe, since it would mean some of which we take for granted as fact within physics is wrong. So people who don't feel up to the challenge of exploring that will look the other way, and people who are too invested in the current paradigm ferociously defend that paradigm especially against this stuff.

Research falls under a few different labels, though if you google them you will have to work at getting past all the skeptics saying it's bullshit. (electromagnetic) Field Effects, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR, formerly called "cold fusion"), "The Hutchison Effect" - among others.

Look into Fleishman and Pons, John Hutchison, Ken Shoulders - there's 2 channels on youtube - "Martin Fleishman Memorial Project" and "Field Interference" - Historically this would have been related to what the earliest scientists were interested in, the Alchemists, since a product of these effects is sometimes the transmutation of elements. This may sound ridiculous, but all it means is that after experiments, tiny amounts of elements are found, through before and after spectral analysis of the samples, which were not present in any form previously. Their presence is not explicable by conventional means, so such evidence often just dismissed or ignored without discussion.

Unfortunately I don't know of a decent, unique or all-encompassing summary resource for you. It's a topic that's all over the place, tragically under-funded (misplaced skepticism and for the above reason, IMO, of protecting the current valuable paradigm). It's covered by different people in different ways.

One way it really came to the fore of the "fringe" though was when a book was published after 9/11, "Where Did The Towers Go?". The author proclaimed that evidence shows the controlled demotion of the WTC was achieved with a secret technology that harnessed these "field effects" rather than explosives (and definitely not the planes). One of that authors major pieces of evidence for this was the presence of too much Tritium at the WTC in the aftermath of the destruction. Whether it was used in the operation of the technology or was a transmuted byproduct of it's use, remains unclear (tritium is basically rare and radioactive form of hydrogen).

Other evidence includes levitation effects (of people and objects like cars) off the ground during the collapse of the towers, a lack of extreme heat, bizarre combinations of destruction that could not be achieved just by heat or fire - paper and rubber remaining unburnt in very close proximity to burning cars and fires - the extremely fast rusting of steel in the area, circular holes in glass and steel I-beams bent in seemingly impossible ways. And on and on. Here's link to a scan of the book if you're interested:

https://archive.org/details/where_did_the_towers_go

I forgot to mention the granddaddy of research into this, Nikola Tesla! That's really the best place to start. It was by trying to mimick Teslas lab and experiments that John Hutchison was able to make some crazy stuff happen to metal and random objects.

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