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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"ll!lllit lal!i! i;n1t~r Figure 6. Apparatus for Ground State Energy Suppression: Casimir Segmented Tunnels Figure 7. Alternative Apparatus for Ground State Energy Suppression: Casimir Strip and Spacer-Channels Microcavity fabrication to match the atomic ground states is daunting because there will potentially be fabrication irregularities that cause edge and surface effects which act upon the particles as they enter or exit the Casimir region. And it is not possible to drill 1.3 billion tunnels having diameters of 0.1 μm. However, it should be feasible to use microchip technology to etch holes into the individual layers first and then assemble the stack. Extremely fine coregistration and alignment of stacks would be an issue, but a surmountable one. A much smaller number of layer pairs and tunnels would suffice for a measurable demonstration of release of ZPE by this process. If such a small-scale demonstration succeeds, larger versions that convert more energy could be built that also take advantage of more efficient thermal-to-electrical energy conversion methods. Also if successful, such apparatuses could be used to explore for secondary effects of converting quantum vacuum energy into thermal, then electrical energy. Further investigation by Puthoff et al. (Reference 28) was based on the premise that the above principle is broadly applicable to other than just atomic ground states. In their experiment, H2 gas was passed through a 1 μm Casimir cavity to suppress the ZPE radiation at the vibrational ground state of the H2 molecule. The anticipated signature for such a process would be an increase in the dissociation energy of the molecule. Initial experiments, shown in Figure 8, were carried out at the Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where an intense UV beam is available to disassociate gas molecules. Unfortunately, problems with the synchrotron beam (unrelated to the experiment) prevented a definitive result from being obtained, so the efficacy of this ZPE-extraction approach remains undetermined at the present time. Further experimentation to investigate this hypothesis has yet to be completed. 13 UNCLASSIFIED//F811. 8FFU!lllit 1!191! l!lhl! I
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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.