Tony's Home                                    240 Thoughts
 
 

Promising New Technologies:


| Muons | Black Holes | Cold Fusion | AntiMatter |

| Gravity | Vacuum | BEC | Sonoluminescence | Water Structure |

| Atomic Clusters - EVOs | Cells and Chips | Qi Field | DNA and Genetic Code |

| Quantum Computing and Superluminal Information | Communication |

| NanoMachines and the Second Law | DARPA |

 
  The range of energies covered by present-day human theories of physics, such as the D4-D5-E6-E7 model, does not extend to the range of Planck energy physics. The next step beyond the LHC in exploring high energies may be a ___2x2 TeV Muon-Muon Collider.     Some potentially very useful phenomena may be:

 

Black Holes. It might be possible to build a Planck-Mass Black Hole using a pion laser, but about 10^20 pions would have to lase together to make a 10^19 GeV Planck-Mass Black Hole.

Ring Singularities of Kerr-Newman Black Holes might be used for SpaceTime travel.

Further, Ring Singularities may be related to Compton Radius Vortex structure of physical particles such as Electrons, Neutrinos, Protons, and Pions.

 

Cold Fusion is now being researched by Los Alamos and CETI, among others.

Since Muonic atoms catalyze fusion, and since electrons in crystal lattices can have effective mass greater than their ordinary rest mass, perhaps crystal lattice structures can give electrons enough effective mass that they can catalyze fusion at cold temperatures. Cold fusion phenomena seem to be related to the ability of such metals as Palladium to absorb large volumes of Hydrogen. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "... at 80° C and one atmosphere, Palladium will absorb up to 900 times its own volume. The absorption causes both the electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility to decrease. ... it expands and becomes harder, stronger, and less ductile in the process. A metallic or alloylike hydride is formed from which the hydrogen can be removed by increased temperature and reduced pressure. ... hydrogen passes rapidly through the metal at high temperatures ..." When metals such as Palladium, that can absorb large volumes of Hydrogen, are placed in water, phenomena related to Cold Fusion can occur.

Interesting phenomena, perhaps related to GravitoEM Induction Region Virtual Gravitons, may also occur when atoms, or Clusters of Atoms, of metals such as Palladium are in aqueous solution.

Perhaps electromagnetic phenomena inside metals such as Palladium could induce fusion, somewhat like the Inertial Electrostatic Fusion of Philo Farnsworth described in the June/July 1999 issue of The American Scientist, in which "... an "evacuated spherical electron tube" ... accelerates the particles into a central zone. The cloud of negative charge in turn attracts positively charged deuterium or tritium ions toward the center, where they collide at high velocity. Although only a few nuclei hit with enough energy to allow fusion, the ions that fail to combine the first time will continue to crisscross the central region under the influence of the inward-pointing electric field. This focusing effect gives the accelerated ions multiple opportunities to fuse without losing significant energy during the failed collisions. ...Robert Hirsch, a physicist Farnsworth hired in 1964, ... hoped to demonstrate the value of funding further work on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. So he mounted his prototype on a stainless-steel dessert cart and wheeled the contraption into the conference room. "Just plugging it into the wall, I think I produced 10^5 neutrons per second," Hirsch recalls. (His more carefully controlled trials in 1967 yielded more than 10^10 neutrons per second, a benchmark that has yet to be beaten by the modern versions of this device.) Yet the AEC proved unreceptive. ...".

The effective mass of electrons in crystal lattices is a complex phenomenon in which a moving electron can carry a heavy trail of crystal lattice distortions with it as it moves, as has been observed for electrons moving in Perovskite lattices. The theory of Colosssal MagnetoResistance (CMR) in Perovskites has been described by Mathur and Thomas in the New Scientist (2 May 1998, pp. 30-33) in terms of electrons moving in a lattice whose unit cell is a central atom such as Manganese (charge +3 or +4) surrounded by 6 octahedral atoms such as Oxygen (charge -2) and by 8 cubic atoms such as Lanthanum (charge +3) or Calcium (charge +2). As the article states, "... The particles' movements and spins interact so strongly with each other, and with the rest of the ions in the material, that everything needs to be taken into account at once. The traditional mathematical approximations ... don't work. ...".

Cold Fusion phenomena could be related to Materials with Negative Permittivity.

According to a 5 March 2002 article by David Whitehouse for the BBC:

"... According to Professor Richard Lahey, ... at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ... as the bubbles in the acetone collapsed due to the ultrasound pulse, they produced miniscule amounts of energy. It is believed that the bubble collapse causes a momentary shock wave that creates high pressures, high temperatures and a flash of light, which scientists call sonoluminescence ... The research, to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York (both US). The scientists fired sound waves through acetone, causing minute bubbles in the liquid to collapse at temperatures of millions of degrees to produce small flashes of light. It is within these collapsed bubbles, the researchers say, that the nuclei of atoms fuse, releasing energy in the same way that the Sun does. ... If science ever does find a way to build a practical nuclear fusion reactor on Earth, it would transform society as the "fuel" could be derived from water....".

According to a 29 March 2003 article by Bennett Daviss in the New Scientist (pages 36-43):

"...the US navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego released a two-volume report ... "Thermal and nuclear aspects of the Pd/D2O system: a decade of research at navy laboratories" ...[ here are web links to pdf files for volume 1, A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories, February 2002, (3.5 Mb) and volume 2, Simulation of the Electrochemical Cell (ICARUS) Calorimetry, February 2002, (41.8 Mb) ]...

...[The report]... lays out the navy's evidence that cold fusion is real, a verifiable nuclear event that releases more energy than it consumes. ...

... September ... 1989 ... Miles ... set up two experiments .. using ...[a]... 6-millimeter thick ... palladium ... rod. After a week or so, both began to deliver a sustained yield of between 20 and 30 per cent more energy as heat than they consumed as electricity. The cells' range of error was 0.02 watts, or 1 per cent. The excess energy measured was as high as 0.52 watts. ... through ... July 1992, Miles ran eight separate experiments with the same cathodes ... Each consistently delivered between 5 and 30 per cent excess energy. He also performed two other tests, using regular water in place of deuterium oxide, but using the same design ... Those two experiments produced no excess heat. ...

... Melich began to dig deeper into the negative cold fusion results reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UK Atomic Energy Authority labs at Harwell, and the California Institute of Technology. ...[at]... CalTech ...[he]... found a hostile reception and was denied access to lab notebooks and other key data. MIT officials told Melich that they had thrown away all the data and notebooks ...[at]... Harwell, Melich found that the researchers ... [f]aced with a looming publication deadline for Nature, "... stopped the experiments at about the time they were beginning to learn how to do them" ...

...[in]... the summer of 1994 ... Ashraft Imam, the NRL's metals wizard ... alloyed samples of pure palladium with boron proportioned at 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75 per cent. ... eight out of nine tests yielded 30 to 40 per cent energy gain. ... the more boron, the more excess energy. ... the ninth ... sample ... unlike the others, which all had a flawless surface, ... had minute cracks ... A correlation between cracks and null results has been noted by many researchers, before and since. ...

... the researchers ... had also seen telltale evidence of nuclear reactions in the form of tritium ... the only way the chemist could account for the excess was to accept the idea that the cell had created tritium at the rate of 5,000 to 7,000 atoms per second ...

... and otherwise inexplicably large amounts of helium ... Miles ... found ...[no]... helium-3 ... But he did find helium-4 in samples of gas from his experiments: an average of 7.93 parts per billion, with the highest registering 9.7, in those that yielded excess energy, compare with a maximum of 4.9 ppb and an average of only 4.9 ppb in cells that showe no unusual heat ... Miles says ..."From the amount of helium-4 found in our samples, I could back-calculate the amount of excess energy the cells should be producing ... I found the measurements to be closely consistent." ...

... ONR ... executive director, Fred Saalfield, ... says ... "For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that ... you could reproduce in another ... lab ... We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. ..." And so ... they decided to declare failure and move on. ...

... in 1997 Miles ... was reassigned to work as a clerk in the stock room. ... He escaped from the stock room in 1997 when Japan's New Hydrogen Energy Program - its euphemism for cold fusion research - invited him to spend six months as one of its visiting scientists. ... Of ... 11 experiments, 10 yielded anomalous energy. ... He has now been invited to China to continue his research. ...".

 

Cold Fusion phenomena could be related to Bose-Einstein-Condensates.

Could the Ark of the Covenant have contained a Cold Fusion Energy Source?

 

Robert Forward, in his books Future Magic (Avon 1988) and Indistinguishable From Magic (Baen 1995), and in his book with coauthor Joel Davis, Mirror Matter (Wiley 1988), studies the use of Antimatter production and storage, and Matter-Antimatter Annihilation, as fuel for space travel and other energy needs. The energy of annihilation of 1 gram of anti-hydrogen by 1 gram of hydrogen is roughly 2 x 6 x 10^23 x 1 GeV = 1.2 x 10^24 x 1.6 x 10^(-3) erg = 2 x 10^21 erg = 5 x 4 x 10^20 erg = 50 kilotons of TNT (the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons of TNT).

 

Gravitomagnetic and Gravitoelectric phenomena in Superconducting Materials, is studied by Ning Li at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, whose work is listed in the Electrogravitic References of Robert Stirman and also described in The Quantum Cavorite website of Pete Skeggs. Work by Podkletnov is described in a Sunday Telegraph Article by Robert Matthews and in an antigravity article in Business Week Online. Peter Skeggs, whose experimental results did not detect an effect, maintains a web site about such phenomena in which he describes his October 1997 visit to NASA-Marshall. In their paper, Static Test for A Gravitational Force Coupled to Type II YBCO Superconductors, Li, Noever, Koczor, and Brantley of NASA_Marshall and UAH conclude: "In any case, the maximum contribution to a change in gravity of a static superconductor in a constant magnetic field was measured as less than 2 parts in 10^8 of the normal gravitational acceleration."

Torr and Li (Foundations of Physics Letters 6 (1993) 371-383 and Phys. Rev. B 46 (1992) 5489-5495 and Phys. Rev. D 43 (1991) 457-459) show that in a Superconductor, an External Electromagnetic Field can induce an Internal Gravitational Field, the magnitude of which coupling of Gravity to Electromagnetism depends on the ratio MUg / MU of gravitomagnetic to magnetic permeabilities in the Superconductor. In vacuum (denoted by subscript o),

MUgo = 4 pi G / c^2

so that MUgo = 7.4 x 10^(-27) coul^2/gram^2. However, in some Superconductors, MUg may be much larger. As Jack Sarfatti has pointed out, in a Bose-Einstein Condensate the speed of light may be very slow, thus greatly increasing the value of MUgo.

The work of Torr and Li may be useful in explaining Relationships between Angular Momentum and Magnetic Dipole Moments.

According to a 28 September 2000 article by Jack Lucenti on space.com: "... In 1996 ... Koczor assembled ... researchers at Marshall Space Flight Center ... together with scientists at the nearby University of Alabama at Huntsville ... to build ... a gravity-shielding ... device ... the partnership fell apart last year [1999] with bad blood between the two sides ... The university's Larry Smalley, a physics professor, says NASA simply failed to assemble a competent team of scientists who could give the project a serious chance. ... Smalley said he remains skeptical that Koczor and NASA have the know-how to do anything meaningful with the project. The main university professor involved with the project, Ning Li, has since left the school. She is said to have moved to China. ...... NASA awarded a $600,000 contract last year [1999] to Superconductive Components Inc. in Columbus, Ohio ... Superconductive Components is in communication with Podkletnov as they attempt to build it, Koczor said. ... J.R. Gaines, vice president of Superconductive Components, .... said ... "The superconductor is built. The rest has been designed and fabrication is proceeding ..." ...".

Torsion might be part of a link between Gravity and Electromagnetism that could be useful in Gravitational Engineering.

Another useful thing for Gravitational Engineering might be the Conformal Structure of the Higgs Mechanism and Gravitation.In terms of the smallest charged Elementary Particle, the First-Generation Fermion Electron Compton Radius Vortex Particle, the Higgs VEV is about 250 GeV = 5 x 10^5 Me (Electron Masses). If the Higgs VEV gives the linear compressibility of the Aether, the Gravitational VEV should be given by the 4-volume compressibility of the Aether, so that the Gravitational VEV is about ( 5 x 10^5 )^4 Me = 6 x 10^22 Me = 3 x 10^22 MeV = 3 x 10^19 GeV. Since the Gravitational VEV should correspond to a pair of Planck Mass Black Holes, the Planck Mass is about 1.5 x 10^19 GeV.

Physical Wavelets, based on Conformal Structure, might be useful with respect to GraviPhoton physics.

 

NASA-Lewis has a program on Breakthrough Propulsion Physics. Robert Forward, in his books Future Magic (Avon 1988) and Indistinguishable From Magic (Baen 1995), says: "... If you take a mass and the gravity field that surrounds it, and move the mass very rapidly, you can create a new field, the gravitational equivalent of magnetism. ... If you can then cause that field to change, you can create a stronger gavity field than you started with. ... that stronger gravity field can be made to appear at a place where there is no mass, and can be either attractive or repulsive. ... there are a number of ways that such a gravity machine can be made. One idea is to roll up some hollow pipe to form a long coil ... then bend the long coil ... to form a curly closed ring. ...

... the pipes are filled with massive fluid and the fluid is moved back and forth in the pipes rapidly ... the machine has to be as big as the distance over which you want the gravity effects to operate. The liquid has to be as dense or denser than white-dwarf-star material, and the speed of the flow has to be so high that the ultradense liquid will approach the speed of light in a few milliseconds. ...". Forward's ring may be a mass-gravity version of a GraviPhoton 2-Torus Ring Ship.

White-dwarf star material is described by Kaufmann (Universe, 4th ed., Freeman 1994) as being made of ions that "... arrange themselves in orderly rows, like an immense crystal lattice. ... The degenerate electrons move around freely in this crystal ... a cool carbon-oxygen white dwarf resembles an immense spherical diamond! ...".

If the crystal structure were engineered so that the electrons not only got effective mass from interactions with the crystal lattice but also effectively carried that mass (and their electric charge) as superconductors of both mass and charge, then you might have an effectively dense mass moving at high velocity.

If the material were in the form of a Bose-Einstein Condensate, then the speed of light might be low, and, as suggested by Jack Sarfatti, factors of powers of v/c might no longer suppress Gravitational Engineering phenomena.

Such a structure might be useful in constructing a spacecraft that surfs on gravimagnetic and electromagnetic lines of force that exist on Earth and in Space, or moves through space by the Alcubierre mechanism (Classic and Quantum Gravity 11 (1994) L73) in which you "... create a local distortion of spacetime that will produce an expansion behind the spaceship, and an opposite contraction ahead of it. In this way, the spaceship will be pushed away from the earth and pulled towards a distant star by spacetime itself. ..." Since the spacetime around the spaceship is not distorted, the spaceship and its contents feel no G-forces from acceleration.

Chris Van Den Broeck has shown that an Alcubierre drive may have reasonable energy requirements and that warp bubbles are not impossible. As of 16 Sep 99, he states: "... Class. Quantum Grav. has just sent me the referee reports for my warp drive paper. ... one referee pointed out ... that I forgot an important factor in the volume element, so that the very small values I obtained for the total energy are not correct. In reality, the energy will be of the order of a solar mass,i.e. in the mass bracket of a large traversable wormhole. This is still 32 orders of magnitude better than what Ford & Pfenning found for a standard warp bubble, but of course it is not as spectacular as my earlier claim. Two consolations are: (a) that the dimensions of the external warp bubble can now be raised to something the size of a proton without affecting the order of magnitude of the total energy, and (b) that the energy is more or less velocity-independent, except for velocities exceeding c by many orders of magnitude. ... also ... I found a flaw in the derivation in Hiscock's first warp drive paper. Hiscock tried to prove that natural vacuum fluctuations on a warp drive background would diverge on some surface as soon as the velocity exceeded c. This could potentially have killed the warp drive idea. However, I found that Hiscock used the wrong vacuum state for his derivation. The divergence doesn't exist. ...". I think that perhaps the results of Chris Van Den Broeck might be improved by using Conformal GraviPhotons. to make a warp drive. Such a Conformal Warp Drive would NOT use exactly the same physics mechanism as that proposed by Alcubierre. In fact, my proposal is NOT equivalent to the mechanism used by Alcubierre. Among the differences, I do not have to build a bubble around the spaceship, while Alcubierre does have to do that.)

 

Could a graviton beam be constructed to produce an Alcubierre drive? Paul Hill (in Unconventional Flying Objects, Hampton Roads 1995) quotes D. D. Ivanenko and Yu. S. Vladimirov (in Matter and Physical Fields - Part One of The Earth in the Universe, translated 1968 in U.S. Department of Commerce Clearinghouse) as saying "... it may be possible for electron-positron pairs to be transformed not only into photons, but also into gravitons". If photon production could be suppressed (perhaps by annihilation in Casimir effect cavities that suppress photons of the matter-antimatter annihilation energy), then perhaps such a graviton beam could be constructed. On the other hand, maybe what Ivanenko and Vladimirov had in mind was more like using Conformal GraviPhotons, or longitudinal Photons, to transform SpaceTime.

Sopuerta, Maartens, Ellis. and Lesame, in gr-qc/9809085, say "In a cold matter universe, the linearized gravito-magnetic tensor field satisfies a transverse condition (vanishing divergence) when it is purely radiative. ... in the exact nonlinear theory, it is no longer possible to maintain the transverse condition, since it leads to a non-terminating chain of integrability conditions. These conditions are highly restrictive, and are likely to hold only in models with special symmetries, ... In models with realistic inhomogeneity, the gravito-magnetic field is necessarily non-transverse at second and higher order."

Faraoni and Dumse, in gr-qc/9811052, say "... [photon beams] superpose linearly when they propagate parallely, while they interact nonlinearly, scatter and form singularities or Cauchy horizons if they are antiparallel. Parallel [photon beams] do interact, but a generalized gravitoelectric force is exactly cancelled by a gravitomagnetic force. ... The gravitoelectric part of the acceleration is always attractive: it cancels the gravitomagnetic part when the beam and the null ray are parallel, and it doubles it when they are antiparallel. ... Given equal energy density in the beams, the light-to-light attraction is twice the matter-to-light attraction and four times the matter-to-matter attraction. ... The present paper does not cover all the possible configurations of light-to-light interaction; for example, one does not know how pulses of light ... that have passed each other interact. ...".

Since the Higgs mechanism interacts with both Gravity and the ElectroWeak U(1)xSU(2) Force, and with the Color SU(3) Force through its Yukawa coupling, it is possible that Strong Gravity in the Induction or Static Regions could couple Gravity to Electromagnetism, the Weak Force, and the Color Force much more strongly than the very weak coupling in the Far Field Region. In a different theoretical context (that of large dimensions in SuperString theory), Lawrence Hall and Christopher Kolda in hep-ph/9904236 show that "... If spacetime contains large compact extra dimensions [or, perhaps, if Strong Gravity in the Induction or Static Regions couples Gravity to Electromagnetism], the fundamental mass scale of nature, LAMBDA, may be close to the weak scale, allowing gravitational physics to significantly modify electroweak symmetry breaking. ... At Run II of the Tevatron collider, a signal for extra dimensions [or, perhaps, Strong Gravity] will be discovered if LAMBDA is below 2.5 (1) TeV for a Higgs boson of mass 100 (300) GeV. Furthermore, such a signal would point to gravitational physics, rather than to new conventional gauge theories at LAMBDA. The discovery potential of the LHC depends sensitively on whether the gravitational amplitudes interfere constructively or destructively with the standard model amplitudes, and ranges from LAMBDA = 3 - 10 (2 - 4) TeV for a light (heavy) Higgs boson. ...". They indicate that the general effect of coupling Gravity to Higgs and Photons is to enhance Higgs decay to two Photons, while the general effect of coupling Gravity to Higgs and Gluons is to enhance Higgs production by Gluon-Gluon fusion, but also to diminish the branching ratio of Higgs decay to two Photons.

 

Physics of the Vacuum, including Casimir effect phenomena. ( Click here to read about Cosmological Constant /\ > 0 phenomena. )

Robert Forward, in his books Future Magic (Avon 1988) and Indistinguishable From Magic (Baen 1995), says: "... The Casimir force is a short range attraction between any two objects caused by ... electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum. ... any two plates, whether conductor or dielectrics, would experience a fourth power force law ... also proportional to the dielectric constant of the plates. ... The equations are only valid down to a separation distance proportional to the minimum wavelength at which the plates are still a good conductor or the dielectric constant is not unity. For distances closer than that ... attractive force will ... increase ... at a rate proportional to the third power of the separation distance. ... The closest separation distance ...[that has been attained is 14 Angstroms]... (about five atoms) with two crossed cylinders of mica. ... the measured force between the two mica cylinders was over ten tons per square meter! ... [To construct a vacuum fluctuation battery, make] ... a wide flat spiral of foil built along the lines of a Slinky toy. ... each turn of the spiral acts against the neighboring turns. The spiral configuration allows substantial compaction of the foil from large spacings to small spacings while maintaining uniform spacing. ... [electric charge could] create an electrostatic repulsion between the plates ... The Casimir force [could] draw the ... leaves together, doing work against the repulsive electric field ...".

According to a September 2002 article by Astrid Lambrecht in Physics World:

"... The fact that an attractive force exists between two conducting metal plates was first predicted in 1948 by Hendrik Casimir of Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands. At the time, however, Casimir was studying the properties of "colloidal solutions" ... that contain micron-sized particles in a liquid matrix. ... van der Waals forces ... did not properly explain the experimental measurements on colloids. ... Working with Dirk Polder, Casimir discovered that the interaction between two neutral molecules could be correctly described only if the fact that light travels at a finite speed was taken into account. Soon afterwards, Casimir noticed that this result could be interpreted in terms of vacuum fluctuations. He then asked himself what would happen if there were two mirrors - rather than two molecules - facing each other in a vacuum. It was this work that led to his famous prediction of an attractive force between reflecting plates.

.... In a free vacuum all of the frequencies are of equal importance. But inside a cavity, where the field is reflected back and forth between the mirrors, the situation is different. The field is amplified if integer multiples of half a wavelength can fit exactly inside the cavity. This wavelength corresponds to a "cavity resonance". At other wavelengths, in contrast, the field is suppressed. Vacuum fluctuations are suppressed or enhanced depending on whether their frequency corresponds to a cavity resonance or not. ... the vacuum field carries energy ...[and] also exert[s] pressure on surfaces, just as a flowing river pushes on a floodgate. This radiation pressure increases with the energy - and hence the frequency ... At a cavity-resonance frequency the radiation pressure inside the cavity is stronger than outside and the mirrors are therefore pushed apart. Out of resonance, in contrast, the radiation pressure inside the cavity is smaller than outside and the mirrors are drawn towards each other. It turns out that, on balance, the attractive components have a slightly stronger impact than the repulsive ones. For two perfect, plane, parallel mirrors the Casimir force is therefore attractive and the mirrors are pulled together. The force, F, is proportional to the cross-sectional area, A, of the mirrors and increases 16-fold every time the distance, d, between the mirrors is halved: F = A/d4. Apart from these geometrical quantities the force depends only on fundamental values - Planck's constant and the speed of light.

  • ... real mirrors do not reflect all frequencies perfectly. They reflect some frequencies well - or even nearly perfectly - while others are reflected badly. In addition, all mirrors become transparent at very high frequencies. When calculating the Casimir force the frequency-dependent reflection coefficients of the mirrors have to be taken into account ... It turns out that the measured Casimir force between real metallic mirrors that are 0.1 micron apart is only half the theoretical value predicted for perfect mirrors. ... simple solid-state models of the mirror match the real behaviour only above 0.5 microns.
  • ... Another problem with calculating the expected Casimir force for a real system is the fact that experiments are never carried out at absolute zero - as originally envisaged in Casimir's calculations - but at room temperature. This causes thermal - as well as vacuum - fluctuations to come into play. These thermal fluctuations can produce their own radiation pressure and create a bigger Casimir force than expected. For example, the Casimir force between two plane mirrors 7 microns apart is twice as large at room temperature than at absolute zero. Fortunately, thermal fluctuations at room temperature are only important at distances above 1 micron, below which the wavelength of the fluctuations is too big to fit inside the cavity.
  • ... A third and final problem in calculating the Casimir force is that real mirrors are not perfectly smooth. Most mirrors are made by coating a substrate with a thin metal film using the technique of "sputtering". However, this produces films with a roughness of about 50 nm. ... such roughness ... does affect measurements of the Casimir force, which is very sensitive to small changes in distance.

... While the Casimir force is too small to be observed for mirrors that are several metres apart, it can be measured if the mirrors are within microns of each other. For example, two mirrors with an area of 1 cm^2 separated by a distance of 1 micron [ roughly the scale of neurons in the human brain and Induction/Static Region Gravity ] have an attractive Casimir force of about 10^(-7) N - roughly the weight of a water droplet that is half a millimetre in diameter. Although this force might appear small, at distances below a micrometre the Casimir force becomes the strongest force between two neutral objects. Indeed at separations of 10 nm - about a hundred times the typical size of an atom [ roughly the scale of microtubules and tubulins in the human brain ] - the Casimir effect produces the equivalent of 1 atmosphere of pressure.

... Mohideen and his group in California have recently used surface deformations to show that two surfaces can also have a lateral Casimir force that acts in a parallel - rather than a perpendicular - direction to the surface of the mirrors. In the experiments they prepared specially corrugated mirrors the surfaces of which were sinusoidally curved. They then moved the mirrors parallel to one another so that a peak of one mirror passed successively over the peaks and troughs of the other mirror. The researchers found that the lateral Casimir force varied sinusoidally with the phase difference between the two corrugations. The size of the force was about ten times smaller than the ordinary Casimir force between two mirrors the same distance apart. The lateral force is also due to vacuum fluctuations.

... nanoscale structures and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) ... devices are fabricated on the micron and submicron scale ... Last year Federico Capasso and his group at Lucent Technologies showed how the ... Casimir ... force can be used to control the mechanical motion of a MEMS device (2001 Science 291 1941). The researchers suspended a polysilicon plate from a torsional rod - a twisting horizontal bar just a few microns in diameter ... When they brought a metallized sphere close up to the plate, the attractive Casimir force between the two objects made the plate rotate. They also studied the dynamical behaviour of the MEMS device by making the plate oscillate. The Casimir force reduced the rate of oscillation and led to nonlinear phenomena, such as hysteresis and bistability in the frequency response of the oscillator. According to the team, the system's behaviour agreed well with theoretical calculations. ...".

S. K. Lamoreaux, in quant-ph/9907076, describes experimental observations of the Casimir effect as of Casimir's 90th birthday in 1999. Lamoreaux says: "... For conducting parallel at plates separated by distance r, this force per unit area A has the magnitude: F(d) / A = pi^2 hbar c / 240 d^4 = 0.013 ( 1 / d^4 ) dyn um^4 / cm^2 This relationship can be derived by considering the electromagnetic mode structure between the two plates, as compared to free space, and by assigning a zero-point energy of (1/2) hbar w each electromagnetic mode (photon). The change in total energy density between the plates, as compared to free space, as a function of separation d, leads to the force of attraction. The only fundamental constants that enter [the equation] .... are hbar and c; the electron charge e is absent, implying that the electromagnetic field is not coupling to matter. The role of c is to convert the electromagnetic mode wavelength to a frequency, while hbar converts the frequency to an energy. ... for sufficiently small separation, the force of attraction varies as 1 / d^3 ... the force in this range is sometimes referred to as the London-van der Waals attraction, while the 1 / d^4 range is referred to as the retarded van der Waals (Casimir) interaction. For the Casimir effect, the crossover distance between the regimes is d = 100 nm, much larger than atomic spacings in the materials, so it still makes sense to describe the materials by their bulk properties (index of refraction); the 1 / d^3 vs. 1 / d^4 interaction is in this case due to the truncation of the mode frequencies that are affected by the changing plate separation.... Since [Dr. Casimir's 80th birthday in 1989] ... , two experiments havebeen performed, ... based on a torsion pendulum balance and on atomic force microscopy (AFM). ...".

Ford and Svaiter, in quant-ph/0003129, say: "... The focusing of the vacuum modes of a quantized field by a parabolic mirror is investigated. We use a geometric optics approximation to calculate the energy density and mean squared field averages for scalar and electromagnetic fields near the focus. We find that these quantities grow as an inverse power of the distance to the focus. There is an attractive Casimir-Polder force on an atom which will draw it into the focus. Some estimates of the magnitude of the effects of this focusing indicate that it may be observable. ... The Casimir effect can be viewed as the reflection of vacuum fluctuations by mirrors. ... The presence of a reflecting boundary alters the modes of a quantized field, and results in shifts in the vacuum expectation values of quantities quadratic in the field, such as the energy density. Typically, Casimir effects for massless fields may be estimated by dimensional analysis. If r is the distance to the nearest boundary, then the Casimir energy density is typically of order r ^4 times a dimensionless constant. This constant is usually of order 10 ^(-3) in four-dimensional spacetime. It is of course possible to find a much smaller result due to special cancellations. ... This leaves the possibility of exceptions, where the energy density is much larger than would be expected on dimensional grounds. ...

 

Bordag, Mohideen, and Mostepanenko, in quant-ph/0106045, "... provide a review of both new experimental and theoretical developments in the Casimir effect. The Casimir effect results from the alteration by the boundaries of the zero-point electromagnetic energy. Unique to the Casimir force is its strong dependence on shape, switching from attractive to repulsive as function of the size, geometry and topology of the boundary. Thus the Casimir force is a direct manifestation of the boundary dependence of quantum vacuum. .... The experiments on measuring the Casimir force are also reviewed, starting first with the older measurements and finishing with a detailed presentation of modern precision experiments. The latter are accurately compared with the theoretical results for real media. ... Currently the Casimir effect has been advanced as a new powerful test for hypothetical long-range interactions, including corrections to Newtonian gravitational law at small distances ... It is also gaining in technological importance in vital applications such as in nanoelectromechanical devices ... The first paper anticipating the dominant role of Casimir forces in nanoscale devices appeared over 15 years ago, but was largely ignored, as then the silicon chip fabrication dimensions were on the order of many microns. More recently, given the shrinking device dimensions to nanometers, the important role of Casimir forces present in nanoscale devices is now well recognized. The important role of the Casimir forces in both the device performance and device fabrication have been acknowledged. Very recently, even an actuator based on the Casimir force has been fabricated using siliconnanofabrication technology ...".

According to Alternate View Column AV-43 written in 1990 by John G. Cramer:

"... K. Scharnhorst, Physics Letters B236, 354 (1990) ... has given a new twist to the Casimir effect by considering the velocity v of a photon travelling across the gap between the plates. If the plates are separated by a gap d, the Casimir effect suppresses all virtual photons with a wavelength of 2d or greater. Because these virtual photons are absent, they cannot participate in games of catch between virtual particles. Therefore a real photon travelling between the plates spends less time as an electron-positron pair because the QED vacuum fluctuations are suppressed. For this reason, the photon travels faster across the gap. Its speed of travel through normal vacuum is c, so its speed v in the negative energy vacuum between the plates is greater than c! ... in reasonable experimental situations, the Scharnhorst effect is not very big. In fact, it's abysmally small. With a plate gap of d, v/c = 1 - (1.6 x 10^(-60) x d^(-4) ). If we make d as small as experimentally possible, say 1 nanometer (= 1 x 10^(-9) m) or about ten atomic diameters, we find that (v-c) = 1.6 x 10^(-24) c. ... normal metals are made of atoms which become very lumpy and non-planar at the nanometer scale. So let's ... make a pair of Casimir plates from superconducting neutronium. ... Suppose that between two such plates we makes a gap on the order of nuclear dimensions, about a femtometer (10^(-15) m). If one takes Scharnhorst's equation for index of refraction at face value, c/v goes to zero and a photon travels at infinite speed when the gap between the plates is decreased to about 1.13 x 10^(-15) m, or about the diameter of a proton. Of course, the approximations used in the calculation may not be valid because of higher-order effects at such small distances. ...".

According to Physics News Update Number 603 #2, September 9, 2002 by Phil Schewe, James Riordon, and Ben Stein:

"... certain highly curved (on a nanoscopic scale) surfaces modify the electromagnetic properties of physical vacuum in their vicinity. This changes the behavior of an atom near nanobodies (quantum dots, nanospheres, nanocylinders, etc.). Generally called the Purcell effect, the phenomenon happens because an excited electron inside the outside atom strongly senses the modified structure of physical vacuum near surfaces in its vicinity. New calculations performed by physicists at the Belarusian State University in Minsk show that due to unique conducting properties of carbon nanotubes the fluorescence rate of an excited atom or molecule in their vicinity should be enhanced by as much as million, a much greater effect than for other geometries studied. The Purcell effect has been observed in many of these other cases, and the Belarusian scientists (contact Prof. Sergei Maksimenko, maksim@bsu.by) hope to find collaborators to test their nanotube hypothesis. The hope is to exploit the enhanced spontaneous decay rate to control the behavior of nuclei, atoms, or organic molecules outside or inside nanotubes. (Bondarev et al., Physical Review Letters, 9 September 2002.) ...".

 

The Zero Point Fluctuations of the Vacuum have been conjectured by Sakharov to be related to Gravity.

Conformal GraviPhotons may be related to the Casimir Vacuum.

Nanostructure Fabrication used for Negative Permittivity Materials might be useful in Casimir Vacuum Enginnering.

 

Bose-Einstein Condensates, Diamonds, and Fermions:

A Bose Einstein Condensate, or BEC, "... consists of particles with such large de Broglie wavelengths that their wave functions overlap, generating a single quantum state that is delocalized across the entire sample. Thus a condensate of atoms is analogous to the coherent field of photons generated inside a laser. ...".

According to a 20 March 2002 article in science.nasa.gov: "... scientists used lasers and magnetic fields to create a new form of matter ...

... Bose-Einstein condensates ... are quantum creatures big enough to see. ... A BEC is a group of ... atoms that merge to make a single matter-wave ...

... if you create two BECs and put them together, they don't mix like an ordinary gas or bounce apart like two solids might. Where the two BECs overlap, they "interfere" like waves: thin, parallel layers of matter are separated by thin layers of empty space. ...

... Atom-laser pulses produced in Ketterle's lab ... at MIT ...

... The curved shape of the pulses was caused by gravity [in the image, down is to the right] and forces between the atoms. ...".

 

Self-Induced Transparency has been used with laser beams passing through a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) of sodium atoms to increase the Refractive Index and slow the Speed of Light to 17 meters/second in a Harvard experiment reported by Lene Vestergaaard Hau et al (Nature, 18 February 1999), according to AIP Physics News Update 415 (18 Feb 99). They "... also observed unprecedentedly large intensity-dependent light transmission. Such an extreme nonlinear effect can perhaps be used in a number of opto-electronic components (switches, memory, delay lines) and in converting light from one wavelength to another.".

A Bose-Einstein Condensate with a low speed of light may have high gravito-magnetic permeability and therefore be useful in gravitational engineering.

According to a 4 April 2003 article by Peter Rodgers in Physics World:

"... Johan Prins of the University of Pretoria ... in South Africa claims to have created a new superconducting state of matter at room temperature. ...[He]... observed the superconducting state in ... diamonds that had been doped with oxygen (Semiconductor Science and Technology 18 S131). Diamond [has tetrahedral structure and] is a semiconductor and Prins has long been interested in using n-type diamond as a "cold" cathode to replace the "hot" cathodes found in television tubes and many other devices. Moreover, he believes that the results of his experiments on n-type diamond surfaces - made by exposing the diamond to energetic oxygen ions - can only be explained by a new type of superconducting state. ... Prins argues that a thin "electron-charge" layer is formed in the vacuum just above the surface of the diamond, and that a depletion layer of positive charges forms in the diamond. This is similar, he says, to the Schottky diode that is generated between an n-type semiconductor and a metal. Prins then applies the equations that describe electron transport through a Schottky diode to his system. He finds that as more and more electrons are extracted from the diamond, the density of electrons in this layer reaches a critical value at which a Bose-Einstein-type condensate of electron pairs forms. Current continues to flow from the diamond cathode through this layer to the anode, even though there is no voltage across the layer - a sign of superconductivity. ... Prins admits that he must show that the state can expel magnetic fields to conclusively prove that the state is superconducting. ...".  

Although a Bose-Einstein Condensate is made of bosons, the bosons may in turn be composites (such as Cooper Pairs) of fermions. The element Helium provides examples:

 

According to a 1995 Alternate View column published in 1996 by Analog, written by John Cramer: "... Wieman and Cornell were able to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate of supercooled 87Rb (rubidium-87) atoms. Rubidium is an alkali metal from the first column of the periodic table, an atom that has a spin of 1/2 in its electron shell structure and is therefore not an obvious candidate for BEC production. However, when a gas of rubidium atoms is placed in a strong magnetic field, all spins line up and adjacent atoms combine to form spin 1 molecules that behave as integer-spin bosons. ... To produce a BEC, a gas of weakly interacting bosonic molecules must be cooled to an ultra-low temperature at which the deBroglie wavelength of the molecules becomes larger than their mean spacing. The problem has been reaching such a temperature. Since the deBroglie wavelength is inversely proportional to the square root of the temperature and molecule spacing grows with temperature, a BEC can only form at a temperature below 170 nano-Kelvin (or 1.7 x 10^(-7) K, 170 billionths of a Celsius degree above absolute zero). ... Another aspect of the BEC is its small size. The size of a BEC of any number of atoms is the same as the size of one atom in the same state. This means that BEC has implications for producing ultra-compact matter. The BEC is a closet for storing atoms that is never full. In fact, the more atoms that have been stored in the BEC, the stronger is the tendency for more atoms to join them, and the strength of this "pull" increases as the factorial of the number of atoms in the condensate. The BEC is so compact and dense that, with sufficient atoms added, a mini-black hole of atomic size should form. ... An isolated rubidium atom has an atomic radius of 3 x 10^(-10) meters, so a BEC of rubidium atoms should be about the same size. The mass of rubidium needed to form a black hole of this size would be 2 x 10^17 kilograms, about 20 times the mass of Mars' largest moon Phobos. The BEC of Wieman and Cornell contained only a few thousand atoms of rubidium. ...".

According to a News from NIST article: "... By making a Bose-Einstein condensate in a particular isotope -- rubidium-85 -- and then changing the magnetic field in which the BEC is sitting, researchers can adjust the wavefunction's self-interaction between repulsion and attraction. ... Making the self-interaction mildly repulsive causes the condensate to swell up in a controlled manner, as predicted by theory. However, when the magnetic field is adjusted to make the interaction attractive ... The condensate first shrinks as expected, but rather than gradually clumping together in a mass, there is instead a sudden explosion of atoms outward.

This "explosion," which actually corresponds to a tiny amount of energy by normal standards, continues for a few thousandths of a second. Left behind is a small cold remnant condensate surrounded by the expanding gas of the explosion. About half the original atoms in the condensate seem to have vanished in that they are not seen in either the remnant or the expanding gas cloud. ...".

 

 

Sonoluminescence does not occur in all liquids.  
Water seems to be special for sonoluminescence.   
The interaction of electric fields and water produces 
filaments within the water and 
quantum phenomena of superradiance and self-induced tranparency.  
In pure water with gas bubbles, 
the filaments may radiate outwardly into the water 
from the spherical surface of a gas bubble.  
As the bubble collapses, 
the filaments would be pushed closer together, 
and the Casimir effect described by Schwinger and Chodos 
could combine with superradiance and self-transparency 
to produce sonoluminescent radiation.  

In letter-length paper (quant-ph/9805023), Liberati, Visser, Belgiorno, and Sciama extend Schwinger's model for sonoluminescence by explicitly calculating the Bogolubov coefficients relating the QED vacuum states associated with the collapse of a dielectric bubble. They explicitly show that sudden (non-adiabatic) collapse leads to the production of real photons with a spectrum proportional to phase space volume, and a high-frequency cutoff that arises from the asymptotic behaviour of the dielectric constant, and they argue that the Casimir energy model remains a viable candidate for explaining sonoluminescence.

In their expanded paper (quant-ph/9805031), Liberati, Belgiorno, Visser, and Sciama emphasize the importance of the difference in refractive indices as a function of wavenumber, pressure, temperature, and noble gas admixture. Although the basic Casimir effect is a universal phenomenon of QED, specific and particular experimental features can be encoded in the refractive index. The Casimir energy changes as the bubble collapses, but it is only in the sudden approximation that converting all the change in Casimir energy to real photons can be justified. For the conversion of zero-point fluctuations to real photons to be relevant for sonoluminescence the sudden approximation must hold for photons all the way out to the observed extreme ultraviolet cut-off (200nm; corresponding to a femtosecond timescale period of 0.66 x 10 ^(-15) sec) of sonoluminescent radiation. This implies that if conversion of zero-point fluctuations to real photons is a significant part of the physics of sonoluminescence then the refractive index must be changing significantly on femtosecond timescales. Thus the changes in refractive index cannot be just due to the motion of the bubble wall. The bubble wall is moving at most at Mach 4, for a 1 micrometer bubble this gives a collapse timescale of 10^(-10) seconds, about 100 picoseconds. Therefore one should not be focussing on the actual collapse of the bubble, but rather the way in which the refractive index changes as a function of space and time: as the bubble collapses the gasses inside are compressed, and although the refractive index for air (plus noble gas contaminants) is 1 at STP it should be no surprise to see the refractive index of the trapped gas undergoing major changes during the collapse process.

In quant-ph/9804006, Buzzacchi, Giudice, and Preparata describe a model of sonoluminescence based on QED coherent interactions in which the final phase of collapse the surface of the "imploding" bubble of H2O reaches a supersonic velocity with respect to the speed of sound in the water vapour, there begins a process of compression which, when the vapour's density reaches the value of 0.31 g/cm^3, leads to the formation of liquid water in a very short time with the release of excess energy (part of the latent heat) as a flash of light with a well defined energy spectrum, both in frequency and intensity, corresponding to a blackbody temperature in excess of 10^5 K, but with a time coherence that is in disagreement with both the blackbody and the electron plasma mechanisms.

Their theory predicts that: all frequencies are emitted simultaneously, there being no delay effect for the low frequencies with respect to high frequencies; the temporal widths do not depend on the nature of the bubble gases; the actual values of the widths depend on the deviations of the imploding interface from sphericity, causing its different parts to reach the critical density at different times (giving such fluctuations the size of about 10^(-5) cm (the size of a Coherence Domain), and considering a radius velocity at R = R about 1.5 x 10^5 cm/s, yields a delta t that is about 60 ps, which is about the right size; and, regarding the coherence of the SL ashes, the theory predicts good coherence properties, for the observed e.m. radiation originates from the classical currents associated with the two-level oscillations of the large number of H2O molecules of the different ( about 150) Coherence Domains. According to their theory, the situation is completely different for diatomic molecules, such as the N2's or O2's of air; their transformation into highly interactive free radicals will lead to their disappearance from the bubble, which may also explain why for purely diatomic gases SL is so unstable and shows very strange memory effects.

In quant-ph/9904008, Liberati, Visser, Belgiorno, and Sciama "... describe an extension of the quantum-vacuum approach to sonoluminescence proposed several years ago by J. Schwinger. [They] ... first consider a model calculation based on Bogolubov coefficients relating the QED vacuum in the presence of an expanded bubble to that in the presence of a collapsed bubble. In this way [they] ... derive an estimate for the spectrum and total energy emitted ... [which is] shown to be proportional to the volume of space over which the refractive index changes, as Schwinger predicted. ...". They go on to say: "... We have also explained why such a change must be sudden in order to fit the experimental data. This leads us to propose ... a model focussed ... on the actual dynamics of the refractive index (as a function of space and time) and not just of the bubble boundary (in Schwinger's original approach the refractive index changes only due to motion of the bubble wall). This proposal shares the generic points of strength attributable to the Casimir route but it is now in principle able to implement the required sudden change in the refractive index. .... ...". In quant-ph/9904013, Liberati, Visser, Belgiorno, and Sciama describe the physical scenario in more detail, saying"... Bubble collapse leads to changes in the spatio-temporal distribution of the refractive index, both via physical movement of the dielectrics, and through the time-dependent properties of the dielectrics. Changes in the refractive index drive changes in the distribution of zero-point modes, and this change in zero-point modes is reflected in real photon production. ... Sonoluminescence cannot be directly related to the static Casimir effect. (The static Casimir effect is relevant only insofar as it gives an approximate value for the energy budget). We hope that the investigation of this paper will convince everyone that only models dealing with the actual mechanism of particle creation ... will be able to eventually prove or disprove the pertinence of the physics of the quantum vacuum to Sonoluminescence. ... There now can be no doubt that bubble collapse (and the associated change in Casimir energy) leads to production of real photons - the controversial issues now move to quantitative ones of precise fitting of the observed experimental data. ...". In quant-ph/9905034, they consider finite volume effects. In quant-ph/9904018, Liberati, Visser, Belgiorno, and Sciama "... propose a fundamental test for probing the thermal nature of the spectrum emitted by sonoluminescence. ... two-photon correlations can in principle discriminate between real thermal light and the quasithermal squeezed-state photons typical of models based on the dynamic Casimir effect. ... For thermal light one should find thermal variance for photon couples. On the other hand, thermofield-like photons should show zero variance in appropriate pair correlations. ...".

 

According to a 5 March 2002 article by David Whitehouse for the BBC:

"... According to Professor Richard Lahey, ... at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ... as the bubbles in the acetone collapsed due to the ultrasound pulse, they produced miniscule amounts of energy. It is believed that the bubble collapse causes a momentary shock wave that creates high pressures, high temperatures and a flash of light, which scientists call sonoluminescence ... The research, to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York (both US). The scientists fired sound waves through acetone, causing minute bubbles in the liquid to collapse at temperatures of millions of degrees to produce small flashes of light. It is within these collapsed bubbles, the researchers say, that the nuclei of atoms fuse, releasing energy in the same way that the Sun does. ... If science ever does find a way to build a practical nuclear fusion reactor on Earth, it would transform society as the "fuel" could be derived from water....".

 


 

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