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

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to explain the existence of EVs. The emerging laboratory evidence led investigators to
consider the hypothesis that the Casimir effect may be a major contributing mechanism
to the formation of EVs in micro-arc discharges. This conjecture is based on models by
Casimir (Reference 48) and Puthoff and Piestrup (Reference 49) suggesting that the
generation of a relatively cold, dense, non-neutral (charged) plasma results in charge­
condensation effects that may be attributable to a Casimir-type pinch effect (that is,
ZPF-induced pressure forces) in which the inverse square-law Coulomb repulsion is
overcome by an attractive inverse fourth-law Casimir force to yield a stable
configuration of bound charges at small dimensions. This is a derivative of Casimir's
semi-classical model of the electron in which a dense shell-like distribution of charge
might suppress vacuum fields in the interior of the shell (Reference 48). However,
initial application of Casimir's model found that the vacuum field inside the modeled
electron was found to augment rather than offset the divergent Coulomb field thus
rendering the electron's self-energy divergent. Puthoff (Reference 50) later resolved
this problem by developing a self-consistent vacuum-fluctuation-based model in which
the net contribution to the point-like electron's self-energy by its Coulomb and vacuum
fields vanishes thus rendering a stable finite-mass electron.
Shoulders and collaborators subsequently investigated different approaches to
extracting useful energy from the vacuum ZPF by way of exploiting EV phenomenon.
Even though EVs can be easily produced in the lab, efforts to test this hypothesis have
not met with success due to technical problems. However, this topic is ideal to pursue
for future research.
V. Theoretical Considerations and Issues
QED VACUUM REVISITED
QED Vacuum as a Plenum
Continued theoretical and experimental research has revealed that the vacuum
constitutes an active agent that contributes to a host of phenomena ranging from
microscopic level shifts of atomic states to possible connections to the cause of
cosmological expansion (Reference 14, 51). As more of its attributes are explored, the
vacuum has been found to exhibit phenomena characteristic of an optical medium, such
as induced birefringence in the presence of an applied magnetic field (Reference 52),
and breakdown (decay) in the presence of external electric fields (Reference 53-55).
The current view is that the vacuum has structure, and can be considered much like a
medium of classical physics. However, the vacuum differs significantly from that of a
classical medium due to the existence of quantum fluctuations. A primary attribute of
quantum theory is the concept of matter and field fluctuations, rooted in Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle.
In second-quantized QED theory, the theory that applies to the electromagnetic
vacuum, the canonical approach to representing fluctuations of the free vacuum
electromagnetic field is to express the field distribution in terms of standing- or
traveling-wave normal modes. Section I suggested that the large value of the
integrated ZPE density fuels the concept of potentially useful vacuum energy conversion
to other forms, should even some small part of the spectral energy distribution be
accessible for conversion by technological means.
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