Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency is dated 2 April 2010 and was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports from FY 2009. It reviews general relativistic warp drives, the cosmological constant, Casimir energy and extra space dimensions. It proposes that dark energy may come from higher dimensions and that controlling those dimensions could one day make a warp drive possible.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR QSFIGI0 k Wi& i'JJk>J -~..........__ __\ / Figure 2. The Interior Region of Parallel Conducting Plates. The region experiences a reduced quantum vacuum energy density owing to the boundary condition the plates impose on the fields. This generates a measurable attractive force that pushes the plates together. For many years, the paper remained unknown (Reference 22), but from the 1970s onward the Casimir effect received increasing attention, and over the last decade it has become very popular (Reference 23). The Casimir effect is a purely quantum effect. In classical electrodynamics the force between the plates is zero. The ideal scenario occurs at zero temperature when there are no real photons (only virtual photons) between the plates; thus, it is the ground state of the quantum electrodynamic vacuum which causes the attraction. The most important feature of the Casimir effect is that even though it is purely quantum in nature, it manifests itself macroscopically. For example, for two parallel plates of area A = 1 cm 2 separated by a distance of d = 1 pm the force of attraction is F:::; 1.3 x 10 7 N. This force is certainly within the range of laboratory force-measuring techniques. Typically, the calculations of the expectation value of the vacuum are divergent, 6 so some form of renormalization must be performed. A full review of the experimental verifications of the Casimir effect are beyond the scope of this paper, but it is certainly worth mentioning that experiments at Washington University using ultra-sensitive Atomic Force Microscopes have experimentally verified the theoretical predictions of the Casimir force to within 1 percent accuracy (Reference 24, 25). Needless to say, many physicists consider this to be a real and well established phenomenon. 6 Divergent meaning the equation predicts an infinite result. Divergences are typical in many calculations using quantum field theory, and an array of ingenious tools is used by physicists to extract finite and meaningful results. 7 UNCLASSIFIED//P81t err1e1111t ~9E 8FtLV
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 33 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.