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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.
“Lockheed”2 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'1"1!11'- l!ll"l"!!!llit 1!1!11!! 811LY shown that this positron must have a very well defined energy. The applied electric field determines how large this energy will be. If the electric/magnetic field is increased above critical strength, then more electron-positron pairs will be produced from the vacuum. Clearly, the charged vacuum is a new ground state of space and matter. The normal, undercritical, electrically neutral vacuum is no longer stable in supercritical fields: it decays spontaneously into the new stable but charged vacuum. Thus the standard definition of the vacuum, as a region of space devoid of real elementary particles, is no longer valid in very strong external fields. The vacuum is better defined as the energetically deepest and most stable state that a region of space can have while being penetrated by certain fields. Magnetically Induced Decay of the Dirac Vacuum Xue (Reference 105, 106) developed a Dirac vacuum decay mechanism that is different from the Heisenberg-Euler-Schwinger mechanism and proposed that energy could be continuously extracted from it. He modeled his decay mechanism a~er the (vacuum electromagnetic) Casimir effect wherein the vacuum state is modified by boundary conditions. From an energetic point of view, the Casimir effect can be physically understood as the following: 1) the continuous energy spectrum of vacuum electromagnetic fields is modified by boundary conditions to be discrete; 2) the vacuum energy of the "final" vacuum state, computed from the discrete energy spectrum in a given finite volume, is smaller than the vacuum energy of the "initial" vacuum state, computed from the continuous energy spectrum in the same volume; 3) as a result, the vacuum gains energy and becomes energetically unstable and has to decay from the "initial" vacuum state to the "final" vacuum state by quantum field fluctuations. This difference of vacuum energies between two vacuum states must be released, and this leads to the attractive and macroscopic force observed in the Casimir effect. Xue suggests that instead of modifying the energy spectrum of virtual photons by boundary conditions as in the Casimir effect, one should attempt to vary the vacuum energy by modifying the negative energy spectrum of virtual fermions (in the Dirac vacuum) by an externally applied magnetic field (of strength 8). In this case, the externally applied magnetic field acts as a boundary condition on the Dirac vacuum. Xue defines the vacuum state with B = 0 as the "initial" vacuum state and the vacuum state with B * 0 as the "final" vacuum state. The negative energy spectrum 20 of the initial vacuum state is modified to the negative energy spectrum 21 of the final vacuum state, due to the external magnetic field. If the vacuum energy of the final 8 * 0 vacuum state made by virtual fermions fully filling its negative energy spectrum is 20 The negative and nondegenerate energy spectrum of free virtual charged fermions in the Dirac vacuum 1s: c,. (IPI) = -(P'. + p: + p: +111' ) 1 /', where pis the magnitude of the fermion's momentum, (p,, PY, p,) are the spatial momentum components, and mis the fermion's mass. This spectral energy density is integrated over all possible momentum states of the quantum field fluctuations in order to give the total (negative) Dirac vacuum energy. 21 The energy spectrum of virtual charged fermions in the presence of an external constant magnetic field (a.k.a. the Landau levels) is: cL (p,.n,h) = -(p: +m' + I e I R(2n + l)-eRh) 1 ,..,, where e is the fermion's bare charge, h = ±1 is the fermion's helicity, n = 0,1,2,3, .. , and the magnetic field Bis along the z-axis. This negative energy spectrum is degenerate in the phase space of (p,, Pv), This spectral energy density is integrated over all possible momentum states of the quantum field fluctuations 1n order to give the total (negative) Dirac vacuum energy. 34 UNCLASSIFIED//F81it 8FFIIIAI!: 1!181! &••1::Y
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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.