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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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Concepts for Extracting Energy From the Quantum Vacuum
I. Summary
Quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space throughout the universe is
filled with electromagnetic waves, random in phase and amplitude,
propagating in all possible directions, and with a cubic frequency distribution.
This differs from the cosmic microwave background radiation and is referred
to as the electromagnetic quantum vacuum, which is the lowest energy state
of otherwise empty space. When integrated over all frequency modes up to the
Planck frequency, Vp ("" 1043 Hertz [Hz]), it represents an energy density of as
much as 10113 J/m 3 , which is far in excess of any other known energy source,
even if only an infinitesimal fraction of it is accessible. Even if one is
constrained to integrate over all frequency modes only up to the nucleon
Compton frequency ( ~ 1023 Hz), 1 this energy density is still enormous ( ~ 1035
J/m 3). In addition, the electromagnetic quantum vacuum is not alone; it
intimately couples to the charged particles in the Dirac sea of virtual fermion
particle-antiparticle pairs (aka the Dirac vacuum) and thereby couples to the
other interactions inherent in the Standard Model (weak and strong force
vacua). However, in the Standard Model of particle physics, the weak force
vacuum is essentially the electromagnetic vacuum, because photons serve as
the massless eigenstates of (unified) electroweak theory with an "effective"
coupling constant that is in fact electromagnetic in strength. 2 And we can
safely ignore any coupling of the quantum electromagnetic vacuum to the
quantum chromodynamic vacuum in this paper because the latter coexists in
two phases: (1) the ordinary vacuum exterior to the hadron, which is
impenetrable to quark color, and (2) the vacuum interior of the hadron, 3 in
which the Yang-Mills fields that carry color (gluons) propagate freely. Both
vacuum phases are separated by a boundary at the surface of the hadron on
which the Yang-Mills and quark fields satisfy boundary conditions.
Even though this zero-point field (ZPF) energy seems to be an inescapable
consequence of quantum field theory, its energy density is so enormous as to
make it difficult to reconcile. Instead, many quantum calculations subtract the
ZPF energy by ad hoc means (for example, renormalization). However, the
effects of the quantum vacuum ZPF that are responsible for a variety of well-
known physical effects are observed, such as:
• Lamb shift .
Spontaneous atomic emission.
1 The characteristic frequency associated with the size of nucleons.
2 The weak force coupling constant is merely the quantum electrodynamic/electromagnetic
coupling constant (i.e., the fine structure constant, a) that is "suppressed" by a simple
inverse-quadratic ratio of the virtual weak force particle mass to the proton mass (a factor
of 10-4).
3 Hadrons are the class of strongly interacting elementary particles which are a bound state
of quarks. This class of particles has two subclasses: baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons
comprised of three quarks) and mesons (comprised of two quarks).
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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.