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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/ /F81il 8FFI1il.t.k Wfili &,.kY elementary particles (for example, hadrons), and which behaves like the dielectric vacuum of electrodynamics. In this second vacuum structure, particles that have a strong charge (such as quarks or gluons) can move freely, but are confined by the frozen vacuum that is everywhere else. This is called the perturbative, or gluon, or "melted" vacuum, which can also be pictured as a quark-gluon plasma. They estimate that there is a "latent heat" of~ 1 GeV/fm 3 (or 10 35 J/m3 ) 22 associated with the phase change of transforming from one vacuum structure to another when the gluonic structures of the perturbative vacuum are melted. It is important to point out here that this is a degradable vacuum structure. This unusual dual vacuum structure led Rafelski and MUiier to speculate on a mechanism for the "burning of matter" as the ultimate source of energy in which it might be possible that the energy contained within baryons could be converted into useful energy. Their idea is to remove or destroy the three quarks residing inside a baryon in order to gain energy, the latent heat, from the melted vacuum inside the baryon. This process also entails the decay of the quarks via lepton-quark interactions, which is a topic that is beyond the scope of this chapter. They suggest that it might be possible that producing a quark-gluon plasma in high energy nuclear collisions could be a very efficient source of energy. In this process atomic nuclei would be collided at high energy in order to form a compressed high density zone in the region where the two nuclei overlap. This would lead to the melting of the vacuum and the subsequent direct conversion of matter into radiation, thus releasing ~ 10 35 J/m3 of energy density. This magnitude of energy density would be very useful as a source of energy for space propulsion applications. Rafelski and MUiier point out that the commonly held view that the centers of neutron stars are dead and cold, due to their nuclear fuel having burnt out and the energy of gravitational collapse having been expended for the conversion of the collapsed star into a gigantic atomic nucleus, is not the complete story. They hold open the possibility that the entire rest-mass of all the baryons inside neutron stars might become available and converted into heat. In their scenario, the core of a neutron star is actually composed of condensed quark matter, and the rest-mass of baryons is burnt up into radiation inside the quark core. They also point out that supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, positron emission from the center of our galaxy, quasars, and galactic nuclei have been observed to emit extreme amounts of thermal energy, the mechanisms of which are still not understood today. Gogohia (Reference 107, 108) modeled Rafelski and MUiier's idea by using an effective potential approach for composite condensate23 operators to formulate a general method of calculating the non-perturbative (NPC) Yang-Mills vacuum energy density (aka the QCD bag model constant, 8 9) 24 in the covariant gauge QCD vacuum-ground state. His result that B9 = 1.84 GeV/fm3 (or 2.95 x 1035 J/m3 ) found very good agreement with its phenomenological value and with Rafelski and MUiier's na'fve estimate. Gogohia also calculated the contribution of the gluon condensate energy density to B9 : (a.sr 2/n) = 1.82 GeV/fm3 (or 2.92 x 10 35 J/m3), where as is the strong n 1 GeV = 109 eV; 1 fm = 10-' 5 m. 23 In quantum field theory, the vacuum expectation value (of a quantum operator) is also called a "condensate," and this is denoted by placing angular brackets around the quantum operator. 20 See Appendix A for a detailed explanation of the QCD bag model. 36 UNCLASSIFIED//FQII. QFFlliil,tik llili &•lk¥
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