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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 6 April 2010, is one in a series of FY 2009 advanced technology reports produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) program. It reviews the physics of zero-point field energy in the quantum vacuum and proposed schemes for extracting it, including the Casimir effect, Forward's vacuum-fluctuation battery, and resonant dielectric spheres. It notes that no practicable extraction technique has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'1"1!11'- l!ll"l"!!!llit tl!II!! l!IHLY of ls, 2s, 3s, and 4s electrons. Xe (Z = 54, r = 2.05 A) has two of each of ls, 2s, 3s, 4s and Ss electrons. Larger Casimir cavities would also be expected to have an effect on the energetics of the outer electron shells (at larger radii). One could therefore expect that a Casimir cavity having d = 0.1 μm could have an effect on reducing the energy levels of the outermost pair of s electrons, and possibly also p electrons and intermediate shell s electrons as well. Continuing with this model, it is reasonable to expect that a 0.1 ~tm Casimir cavity could result in a release of 1 to 10 eV for each injection of a He, Ne, Ar, Kr or Xe atom into such a cavity. According to Maclay (Reference 26), a long cylindrical Casimir cavity results in an inward force on the cavity walls due to the exclusion of interior ZPF modes. In the "exclusion of modes" interpretation of the Casimir force, this implies that a cylindrical cavity of diameter 0.1 μm could yield the desired decay of outer shell electrons and subsequent release of energy. If one lets the length of the cylinder be 100 times the width, this results in/_= 10 μm for the length of the Casimir tunnel. Taking advantage of this effect, Puthoff (private communication, 2004) and Haisch and Moddel (Reference 27) propose a segmented tunnel consisting of alternating conducting and non-conducting materials, each 10 μmin length. In a length of 1 cm, there could be 500 such pairs in segments, resulting in 500 energy releases (each yielding 1 to 10 eV) for each transit of an atom through the entire 1 cm-long Casimir tunnel. Now consider a 1 cm 3 block that is built up of 10 μm thick alternating layers as described above (see Figure 6 for an illustration of this apparatus). Assume that tunnels of 0.1 ~1m diameter could be drilled through the cube perpendicular to the layers (this is not physically possible, of course; tunnel manufacture must be done differently). If 10 percent of the cross section comprises entrance to some 1.3 billion tunnels, then the amount of energy released would be proportional to the flow rate of the gas through the tunnels (for the number of entrances and exits through Casimir segments). A flow rate of 10 cm/s through a total cross sectional area of 0.1 cm 2 yields 1 cm 3 of gas per second flowing through the tunnels, which at STP would be 2.7 x 1019 atoms. A very simple sealed, closed-loop pumping system could maintain such a continuous gas flow. Since each atom interacts 500 times during its passage, there would be 1.3 x 10 22 transitions per second in the entire cube of 1 cm 3 . An energy release of 1 to 10 eV per transition corresponds to 2,150 to 21,500 W of power released from the entire Casimir cube of tunnels. This can also be achieved by using a pair of plates with conducting strips creating Casimir cavities (via 5000 strip pairs) that are separated by 0.1 pm spacers, through which Hg liquid or monatomic gases (for example, He, Ne, Ar, Kr, or Xe) flow (Reference 27). See Figure 7 for an illustration of this apparatus. However, again, all of this assumes that the chain of conjectures detailed above is correct. Fortunately, this can be experimentally tested. 12 UNCLASSIFIED//EiOAt OEiEil&l11J.k WliEii &••LY
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 57 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.