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Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships
Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 @ 14:41:12 GMT by vlad
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 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Travel through wormholes, time machines
and hovering landspeeders are the stuff of science fiction novels.
Nevertheless, scientists have suggested that the quantum mechanics of
something called the Casimir effect can be used to produce a
locally mass-negative region of space-time, a phenomenon that
theoretically could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster
than light travel ("Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition"). For many years the Casimir effect was little more than a theoretical curiosity.
With the advances in micro- and nanotechnology and
the fact that the Casimir force affects nanoscale devices such as NEMS,
research in detecting and manipulating this mysterious force has
generated substantial interest.
Now, the secretive DARPA,
a research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense that often dabbles
in far-out technologies – and that also brought us the Internet's
predecessor ARPANET – is soliciting innovative research proposals in
the area of Casimir Effect Enhancement (Solicitation number DARPA-BAA-08-59.
...
As it now turns out, this is becoming a serious
research area with DARPA being interested in funding approaches that
can lead to the ability to manipulate Casimir forces.
Ok, so what about those interstellar spaceships? In 1996, NASA actually started a program called Breakthrough Propulsion Physics
– now practically dormant due to lack of funding – that looked at
concepts like space drives and faster-than-light travel, the kind of
breakthroughs that would make interstellar travel practical.
The basic idea is that if one could exploit the fact that vacuum is an
energy reservoir, thanks to zero-point energy, future space travelers
would have access to a limitless energy source. The only thing they
need, of course, is some kind of propulsion system that harvests the
required energy from the vacuum. That this is not totally crazy was
demonstrated in a 1984 paper ("Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors").
Serious research efforts are being made in various laboratories to
harness the Casimir and related effects for vacuum energy conversion.
...
Full article By Michael Berger: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=7337.php
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Re: Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships (Score: 1)
by nanotech on Saturday, September 20, 2008 @ 20:16:36 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | THIS IS EXACTLY What people such as Electrodynacat and myself have been speaking of: Nanotech and the ZPE. There is a connection in that size range.
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- Re: Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships by Prophmaji on Monday, September 22, 2008 @ 07:22:04 GMT
- Re: Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships by Prophmaji on Monday, September 22, 2008 @ 07:47:44 GMT
- Re: Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships by Prophmaji on Monday, September 22, 2008 @ 08:01:56 GMT
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Casimir effects in the real world (Score: 1)
by vlad on Sunday, November 02, 2008 @ 21:39:53 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | Quantum fluctuations in the electromagnetic field give rise to
Casimir forces between two bulk materials (and the related
Casimir-Polder force, which occurs between an atom and a surface). In
both cases, the magnitude and sign of the force depend on the
electromagnetic properties of the materials. However, one has to be
careful how the effects of finite conductivity are introduced into
existing theory.
Two papers appearing in Physical Review Letters
tackle this problem for the Casimir and Casimir-Polder forces. Lev
Pitaevskii, affiliated with both the University of Trento in Italy and
the Kapitza Institute in Moscow, calculates the Casimir-Polder force
between an atom and a dielectric surface for quasistatic electric
fields. In particular, his calculations extend between the two limits
where the surface is a good metal and a good insulator. Diego Dalvit of
Los Alamos National Laboratory and Steve Lamoreaux of Yale University
explore similar limits for both the Casimir and Casimir-Polder forces,
but include the frequency dependence of the electric fields.
Both
papers elegantly express the results in terms of measurable materials
properties. As cleverly designed experiments are exploring the ways in
which temperature, geometry, and charge fluctuations affect Casimir
forces, these calculations will certainly be tested. – Jessica Thomas
Source: http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.163202 [physics.aps.org]
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