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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.
“Edwards Air Force Base”1 page
UNCLASSIFIED//F811. 8FFll!l*le 1!1!11!! 8111:!Y II. Historical Concepts for Extracting Energy and Thermodynamic Considerations The Casimir force is a force associated with the electromagnetic quantum vacuum (Reference 5). This force is an attraction between parallel uncharged metallic plates that has now been well measured and can be attributed to a minute imbalance in the ZPF energy (ZPE) density inside the cavity between the plates versus the region outside the plates as shown in Figure 1 (Reference 6-8). As shown in the figure, the vacuum is full of virtual photons (that is, zero-point vacuum fluctuations), but photons with wavelengths, I., more than twice the plate separation, d, are excluded from the space between them, which causes the imbalance that pushes the plates together. The primary requirement for space travel is energy. It is sometimes assumed that attempting to extract energy from the vacuum ZPF would somehow violate the laws of thermodynamics. Fortunately, it turns out that this is not the case. A thought experiment published by Forward (Reference 9, 10) demonstrated how the Casimir force could in principle be used to extract energy from the vacuum ZPF. Forward showed that any pair of conducting plates at close distance experiences an attractive Casimir force that is due to the electromagnetic ZPF of the vacuum. A "vacuum- fluctuation battery" can be constructed by using the Casimir force to do work on a stack of charged conducting plates as shown in Figure 2. By applying a charge of the same polarity to each conducting plate, a repulsive electrostatic force will be produced that opposes the Casimir force. If the applied electrostatic force is adjusted to be always slightly less than the Casimir force, the plates will move toward each other and the Casimir force will add energy to the electric field between the plates. The battery can be recharged by making the electrical force slightly stronger than the Casimir force to re- expand the foliated conductor. Casimir£--r V II t acuum pa es fluctuations Figure 1. Illustration of the Casimir Effect 1.kt:trnstalic Rcrulsi1111 Figure 2. Vacuum-Fluctuation Battery (Reference 9) Cole and Puthoff (Reference 11) verified that (generic) energy extraction schemes are not contradictory to the laws of thermodynamics. For thermodynamically reversible processes, no heat will flow at temperature T = 0. However, for thermodynamically 1 UNCLASSIFIED/,'f81il 8ffl@Itllt ~:!IE! 8HLY
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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.