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

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elementary particles (for example, hadrons), and which behaves like the dielectric
vacuum of electrodynamics. In this second vacuum structure, particles that have a
strong charge (such as quarks or gluons) can move freely, but are confined by the
frozen vacuum that is everywhere else. This is called the perturbative, or gluon, or
"melted" vacuum, which can also be pictured as a quark-gluon plasma. They estimate
that there is a "latent heat" of~ 1 GeV/fm3 (or 1035 J/m3) 22 associated with the phase
change of transforming from one vacuum structure to another when the gluonic
structures of the perturbative vacuum are melted. It is important to point out here that
this is a degradable vacuum structure.
This unusual dual vacuum structure led Rafelski and Muller to speculate on a
mechanism for the "burning of matter" as the ultimate source of energy in which it
might be possible that the energy contained within baryons could be converted into
useful energy. Their idea is to remove or destroy the three quarks residing inside a
baryon in order to gain energy, the latent heat, from the melted vacuum inside the
baryon. This process also entails the decay of the quarks via lepton-quark interactions,
which is a topic that is beyond the scope of this chapter. They suggest that it might be
possible that producing a quark-gluon plasma in high energy nuclear collisions could be
a very efficient source of energy. In this process atomic nuclei would be collided at high
energy in order to form a compressed high density zone in the region where the two
nuclei overlap. This would lead to the melting of the vacuum and the subsequent direct
conversion of matter into radiation, thus releasing ~ 1035 J/m3 of energy density. This
magnitude of energy density would be very useful as a source of energy for space
propulsion applications.
Rafelski and Muller point out that the commonly held view that the centers of neutron
stars are dead and cold, due to their nuclear fuel having burnt out and the energy of
gravitational collapse having been expended for the conversion of the collapsed star
into a gigantic atomic nucleus, is not the complete story. They hold open the possibility
that the entire rest-mass of all the baryons inside neutron stars might become available
and converted into heat. In their scenario, the core of a neutron star is actually
composed of condensed quark matter, and the rest-mass of baryons is burnt up into
radiation inside the quark core. They also point out that supernovae explosions, gamma
ray bursts, positron emission from the center of our galaxy, quasars, and galactic nuclei
have been observed to emit extreme amounts of thermal energy, the mechanisms of
which are still not understood today.
Gogohia (Reference 107, 108) modeled Rafelski and Muller's idea by using an effective
potential approach for composite condensate23 operators to formulate a general
method of calculating the non-perturbative (NPC) Yang-Mills vacuum energy density
(aka the QCD bag model constant, B9) 24 in the covariant gauge QCD vacuum-ground
state. His result that B 9 = 1.84 GeV/fm3 (or 2.95 x 1035 J/m 3) found very good
agreement with its phenomenological value and with Rafelski and Muller's naive
estimate. Gogohia also calculated the contribution of the gluon condensate energy
density to B
(o.sr /rc) = 1.82 GeV/fm (or 2.92 x 10
3
J/m
where as is the strong
2
3
5
3
:
) ,
9
22 1 GeV = 109 eV; 1 fm = 10-15 m.
23 In quantum field theory, the vacuum expectation value (of a quantum operator) is also called a "condensate,"
and this is denoted by placing angular brackets around the quantum operator.
24 See Append ix A for a detailed explanation of the QCD bag model.
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