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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.
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UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'P81l 8PPll!lllit tl!II!! t!IHLY Gravitational Squeezing of the Vacuum In their study of traversable wormholes, Hochberg and Kephart (Reference 84) discovered that the gravitational field of any astronomical body produces a zone of negative energy around it by "dragging" some of the virtual quanta (a.k.a. vacuum ZPF) downward. They applied their discovery to the problem of creating and stabilizing traversable wormholes. Their quantum optics analysis showed that there is a distortion of the vacuum electromagnetic ZPF due to the interaction with a prescribed gravitational background, which results in "squeezed" vacuum states that possess a negative energy density. Squeezing of the vacuum is a quantum process that is roughly analogous to the compression of an ordinary fluid. This means that as the vacuum field is continuously being squeezed by the gravitational field of a body, its energy is continuously being degraded with respect to the undisturbed remote vacuum field. The magnitude of the gravitational squeezing of the vacuum can be estimated from the quantum optics squeezing condition for given transverse (to the direction of gravitational acceleration) momentum and (equivalent) energy eigenvalues, j = 8rcrs/lc, 13 of two electromagnetic ZPF field modes, subject to the squeezing condition j ➔ 0, where /-. is the ZPF mode wavelength and rs is the Schwarzschild radius of the astronomical body under study (Reference 84). 14 This condition simply states that substantial gravitational squeezing of the vacuum occurs for ZPF field modes with A;::,: 8rcrs. The corresponding local vacuum state energy density that this effect produces is pE-gsvac = -2rc217c//,4. It is not clear whether this mechanism can be exploited to extract energy from the vacuum. Conservation of energy suggests one of two possible outcomes: 1) the lost energy is injected into the gravitational energy of the body, or 2) the lost energy reappears as an accumulation of positive energy density ZPF modes elsewhere in the universe. Further research will be needed to address this question. Redshifting the Vacuum Calloni et al. (Reference 85, 86) explored the possibility of verifying the equivalence principle for the zero-point energy of QED. They used semi-classical quantum gravity theory to evaluate the net force produced by the quantum vacuum ZPF acting on a rigid Casimir cavity in a weak gravitational field which is modeled using the standard Schwarzschild spacetime metric geometry. 15 They evaluated the regularized (or renormalized) stress-energy tensor (T..1.:i) of the quantized vacuum electromagnetic field between two plane-parallel ideal metallic plates lying in a horizontal plane. (r,,:::') encodes the Casimir effect, which has a negative energy density and a negative pressure along the vertical (gravitational acceleration) axis between the plates. Bimonte 13 Note thatj contains an extra factor of two (compared to thej derived in Reference 84) in order to account for the photon spin. H rs = 2GM/c 2 is the critical radius at which a body of mass M collapses into a black hole. It is used here as a convenient distance parameter to simplify the inequality, but there Is no actual black hole collapse involved in this mechanism. G is Newton's universal gravitation constant (6.673 x 10 11 Nm 2/kg 2 ). 15 A spacetime metric is a Lorentz-invariant distance function between any two points In spacetIme, which is defined in terms of a metric tensor, g""' that encodes the geometry of spacetime (Greek indices r1,v = 0 ... 3 denote spacetime coordinates, x0.. x3, such that x 1 .x3 = space coordinates and 0 :a: time coordinate). 29 UNCLASSIFIED/ /f81il 8FrI@Itllt ""I! enc I
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