DOW-UAP-D131, AAWSAP DIRD, The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research, March 2010

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The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research Prepared by: Acquisition Support Division (DW0-3) Defense Warning Office Directorate for Analysis Defense Intelligence Agency AAP Person 75 Administrative Note COPYRIGHT WARNING: Further dissemination of the photographs in this publication is not authorized. This product is one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Warning Office's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. Comments or questions pertaining to this document should be addressed to !AAP Person 1 AAWSA Program Manager, Defense Intelligence Agency, ATTN: CLAR/ DW0-3, Bldg 6000, Washington,

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The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research This paper is a historical survey of the role superconductors have played in the recent search for laboratory-scale manipulation of gravity. The invention of superconductors and, in particular, the recent development of high­ temperature ceramic superconductors have provided the impetus for pursuing a connection between gravity, electromagnetism, and, in particular, magnetism and matter in the solid state. The discovery of yttrium-barium­ copper oxide (YBCO) YBa2Cu301 ceramics able to superconduct at liquid nitrogen temperatures allowed many laboratories around the world to fabricate these superconductors in various experimentally useful sizes. True Meissner repulsion was obtained by cooling them using relatively cheap liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium. For the theoretician, the possibility of considering the superconductor being a macroscopic quantum object as a reality rather than a fantasy suggested several avenues for developing theories connecting gravity and gravity-like forces to engineerable matter. For the experimentalist, extrapolations from these theories suggested there might actually be gravitational disturbances in the laboratory that would be amenable to measurement, assuming all necessary precautions were taken to exclude artifact.

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Gravity Waves A distinction should be made between gravitational waves, the gravitational "force," and anomalous forces. Currently, work on gravitational waves is divided into two more or less distinct realms: low frequency (less than a few hundred Hz) and high frequency (greater than several tens of kHz). The existence of gravitational waves of any frequency is a natural outcome of Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). The search for low-frequency gravitational waves currently utilizes large, heavy, and long metal bars as detectors together with interferometers, strain gauges, and accelerometers in an attempt to detect quadrupolar gravitational waves from cosmological sources, such as binary stars. The general idea is that if a large mass of precisely known dimensions is effectively isolated from the surrounding environment (such as Earth) by means of special vibration and other isolators, the masses will interact with the small-amplitude gravity waves emitted by large masses in the cosmos and their lengths will change, but by extremely small amounts. UGO, LISA, VIRGO, DECIGO (Japan), and CEGO {China) are some of the acronyms given to these experiments. They are primarily attempts to verify the existence of these waves to further solidify the understanding that GR gives us about the nature of space and matter. Several researchers consider that high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGW) will be produced in the laboratory under certain conditions in the near future (Reference 1). These researchers have a considerably more ambitious view of the future than the low-frequency gravitational wave researchers, including the use of HFGW for communications, telescopy, microscopy, and possibly propulsion. Some consider that the production and detection of these waves will be mediated, or at least assisted, by superconductors (References 2, 3). Current research on the link between HFGW and the manipulation of gravity for propulsion is at present only theoretical. If gravitational waves can interact with and be converted into forces in laboratory-scale matter, it is hoped that those forces would be manifest not as gravitational forces per se, as these gravitational forces would be exceedingly small and difficult to unequivocally detect in the laboratory, but rather as electromagnetic or ponderable nongravitational forces, thus making them more amenable to detection by electromagnetic means. The gravitational "force" arises from the tendency of one body to accelerate toward another. (Force is in quotation marks here merely for simplicity and ease of use when comparing gravity with other forces, as many other gravity-like forces can be easily confused in the laboratory with actual gravitational attraction.) The physical explanation for gravitational attraction has been elusive at best. Several notable attempts at novel explanations have recently been published. Puthoff (Reference 4) developed an idea originally put forward by Sakharov (Reference 5) that posits gravity as a Casimir-like attraction arising within the universal sea of fluctuating electromagnetic interactions, sometimes called zero-point fluctuations. Alzofon (Reference 6) presented an engineering approach to interacting with gravity by means of altering nuclear entropy using a technique associated with electron paramagnetic resonance called dynamic nuclear orientation-that is, enhanced polarization of the magnetic moments of nucleons by interaction with pulsed polarized electron spins. Hughes (Reference 7) analyzed the Kopernicky Conjecture, which holds that gravity is nothing other than the slight difference between forces of coulomb attraction and repulsion. However, none of these researchers appealed to the special form of matter constituting superconductors.

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The "attraction" of modifying gravity-whether your own, your spacecraft's, or that of a nearby large mass-for propulsive purposes lies in two general categories of effect: • The modifying, neutralizing, or negating of the gravitational attraction of a nearby body, typically Earth. • The provision of propulsive force or impulse to a spacecraft based on manipulation of the same underlying physical phenomenon that forms the basis of gravity. The theoretical and experimental attempts outlined in this paper deal with both these In experiments designed to produce a gravity-like force or to interact directly with a local gravity field, the researcher has to be looking for extremely small deviations from a null result. Observations to date demonstrate that interactions between gravity and electromagnetic fields, given the field densities and strengths available to even the most well-equipped laboratory, are many orders of magnitude smaller than those required to begin to see such forces. Braginski et al. (Reference 8) showed that ordinary matter cannot be used to generate measurable gravitational fields in the