AAWSAP DIRD, Concepts for Extracting Energy from the Quantum Vacuum, April 2010

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four orders of magnitude larger. Commercial equipment readily allows measurements of
the voltage spectrum in the GHz regime. Therefore, given a cost tradeoff of copper vs.
tungsten coil fabrication, the use of copper coils may be preferred. Suitable coils can be
fabricated by a custom coil-winding vendor. A second coil can be used in a control
experiment constructed with the same parameters as the first coil, but with half of its
turns wound in the reverse direction. This will make the coil non-inductive so that its
voltage spectral density should correspond to the lower red curve in Figure 4.
ZPF ENERGY EXTRACTION BY GROUND STATE ENERGY REDUCTION
As first analyzed by Boyer (Reference 22), and later refined by Puthoff (Reference 23),
the following paradox was addressed: even though atomic ground states involve
electrons in accelerated motion, such states are nonetheless radiationless in nature ­
even though it is well known from classical electrodynamics that charged particles
undergoing acceleration must always emit radiation. For the standard Bohr ground
state orbit of the hydrogen atom, this was interpreted as an equilibrium process in
which radiation by the electron in its ground state orbit was compensated by absorption
of radiation from the background vacuum electromagnetic ZPE. This interpretation has
recently been strengthened by the analyses of Cole and Zou (Reference 24, 25) using a
SED model for the vacuum ZPE. Since the balance between emitted orbital-acceleration
radiation and absorbed ZPE radiation is modeled as taking place primarily at the ground
state orbital frequency, one can consider the possibility of using this feature in some
type of mechanism to extract energy from the ZPF. One fundamental difference
between the SED interpretation and that of quantum mechanics is that in quantum
mechanics the ls state of the electron is regarded as having zero angular momentum,
whereas in the SED interpretation the electron has an angular momentum of
mp~I 137 .7
The Bohr radius of the hydrogen atom in the SED view is 0.529 A. This implies that the
wavelength (A) of zero-point radiation responsible for sustaining the orbit is 2n •0.529 •
137 = 455 A(or 0.0455 µm). It has been conjectured by Puthoff and Haisch (private
communication, 2004) that suppression of zero-point radiation at this wavelength (and
at shorter wavelengths) inside a Casimir microcavity could result in the decay of the
electron to a lower energy state determined by a new balance between classical
emission of an accelerated charge and absorption of zero-point radiation at 'A, < 455 A,
where ;i_ depends on the microcavity plate separation (d) . Since the frequency of this
orbit is 6.6 x 1015 Hz, no matter how quickly the atom were to be injected into a
Casimir microcavity, one would assume that the decay process would be a slow one as
experienced by the orbiting electron. Figure 5 shows a schematic representation of a
hydrogenic atom in free space and inside a microcavity.
7 me = electron mass (9.11 x 10-31 kg), re = electron radius, atomic fine structure (a.k.a. QED coupling) constant er.
=1/137, and c/137 is the classical orbital velocity of the ground state electron.
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