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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; ;retl 8ffllil.t.k WE'lii '"" Y Given the heuristic value of certain aspects of SED modeling, but with the shortcomings outlined above noted, SED theorists de la Pena and Cetto have proposed a modification to SED they call LSED (linear SED) (Reference 74). The modification consists of the addition of three new constraining principles that result in a form of convergence with non relativistic quantum mechanics while retaining some of the appealing attributes of standard SED (for example, quantum states being stable on the basis of a dynamic balance between absorption and emission of background vacuum fluctuation fields). The added constraints (for example, an added constraint that invokes detailed energy balance for separate frequencies) result in correcting several known problems with standard SED. For example, now the equilibrium spectrum is Planck's, not Rayleigh- Jeans, and wavelike behavior of matter and nonlocality issues can be addressed, and so forth. The issue of continuous vacuum energy conversion has yet to be addressed in this new formalism, however, so that remains for the future. QED Without Second-Quantized Fields As yet another alternative to canonical second-quantized QED, Barut (Reference 75) has proposed that effects attributable to vacuum ZPF can be derived with a theory in which there are source (matter) fluctuation fields but no vacuum fluctuation fields, and that even the former can be eliminated. Barut's approach is developed in considerable detail as an independent, self-consistent, formulation of QED in its own right. Barut argues that effects normally attributed to vacuum fluctuations in the second-quantized, linear theory of the radiation field can be equally well computed within the framework of a non-second-quantized, nonlinear theory which is based entirely on matter wave functions alone. His program is to assess how far one can go in understanding radiative processes without second quantization or vacua that fluctuate. Barut and his collaborators have successfully applied the theory to the Lamb shift and spontaneous emission (Reference 76, 77), problems of cavity QED (Reference 78), Casimir-Paider and van der Waals forces (Reference 79), calculations of the electron's ge-2 factor (Reference 80-82), 12 and the Davies-Unruh effect (Reference 83) among others. Given that the formalism of second-quantized field operators are not used at all in the Barut approach, the seemingly quantized properties of fields are taken to simply reflect first quantization of the sources. Therefore, in the absence of the independent existence of second-quantized field fluctuations, the QED arguments concerning immutability and nondegradability of quantized vacuum fluctuation fields, and the corollary proscription against potential conversion of energy from such fields, do not apply. As in the neoclassical approach, the question of the conversion of quantum ZPE to other forms must be diverted to consideration of the global properties of matter fluctuation interactions in the as-yet-incomplete development of the Barut approach. EXAMPLES OF DEGRADABLE OF DECAYING VACUUM In closing, several examples of a degradable vacuum that are predicted by quantum field theory, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and the Standard Model of elementary particle physics will be reviewed. It turns out that the vacuum in QED theory is in fact degradable in spite of its "hardwired" ZPF modes. 12 ge is the electron's gyromagnetic ratio. 28 UNCLASSIFIED/ /F8Pl 9PPICIAL USE ONLY
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