Defense Intelligence Reference Document Concepts For Extracting Energy From The Quantum Vacuum

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presence of cosmological spacetime curvature, and 2) the high-frequency modes are
unaffected by the presence of cosmological spacetime curvature so they take the flat
Minkowski spacetime form; that is, these modes contribute nothing to the physical
vacuum energy (Reference 4). This then enforces a very low-frequency cutoff that
renormalizes the total vacuum energy, leading to a minute residual cosmological
vacuum energy density of 10 9 J/m3, which has been observed. Also, investigators
studying supersymmetric and superstring quantum gravity theories have proposed the
limited cancellation of some positive energy electromagnetic ZPF modes by some
negative energy fermionic (Dirac vacuum) ZPF modes as an explanation for the
observed minute vacuum energy density.
ELEMENTS OF SED THEORY
An alternative to QED, stochastic electrodynamics (SED) identifies the origin of the ZPF
as a direct consequence of a classical ZPF background. SED begins with the ordinary
classical electrodynamics of Maxwell and Lorentz, but instead of assuming the
traditional homogeneous solution of the source-free differential wave equations for the
electromagnetic potentials, one instead considers that due to multiple charged particles
moving throughout the universe, there is always a random electromagnetic radiation
background present that affects the particle(s) in any experiment. This new boundary
condition (random radiation background) replaces the prior null background of
traditional classical electrodynamics. Moreover, the principle of relativity dictates that
identical experiments performed in different inertial frames must yield the same result,
and that this random classical electromagnetic radiation must be isotropic in all inertial
frames; it is invariant under scattering by a dipole oscillator, invariant under redshift
(Doppler, cosmological, gravitational, no Einstein-Hopf drag force), and must therefore
have a Lorentz-invariant energy density spectrum. The only energy density spectrum
that obeys such conditions is one that is proportional to the cubic power of the
frequency. Interestingly, this is exactly the same frequency dependence as that of the
QED spectral ZPF energy density described above, when the temperature Tis set to
zero in Equation (1). Thus in SED, the random radiation assumes the role of the ZPE of
QED, and is termed the classical electromagnetic ZPE. Planck's constant appears then in
SED as an adjustable parameter that sets the scale of the ZPE spectral density.
The formulation of the SED model has evolved over time, beginning with the work of
Nernst in 1916 and the later foundational work of Marshall and Boyer in the 1960s
(Reference 14). The original Standard SED model was based on random phases with
fixed electric-field mode amplitudes. The more recent Modified SED model employs
random phases with random electric-field mode amplitudes and a full probability
distribution for the ground state amplitude, in agreement with quantum theory
(Reference 16). A comparison of SED with quantum theory shows that the first and
second moments of the spectral energy distribution are identical, but beyond that, the
distributions diverge widely. Nevertheless, several quantum theory results have been
reproduced by means of the SED approach, such as (Reference 14, 17):
• Quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator.
• Lamb shift.
• Blackbody radiation.
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