Hotta surprisingly discovered that, in fact, a simple series of events could induce the quantum vacuum into a negative state, giving up energy that the quantum vacuum seemed to lack. . “At first I thought maybe I was wrong,” he said. “So I did the math again and checked my logic. But I didn’t find any flaws.”
This problem arises from the strange nature of the quantum vacuum. A quantum vacuum is a special kind of nothingness that looks dangerously like something else. The uncertainty principle prevents a quantum system from settling into a completely quiet state with completely zero energy. As a result, even a vacuum must constantly crackle with fluctuations in the quantum field that fills it. These endless fluctuations inject a minimal amount of energy into any field known as zero point energy. Physicists say that the system with this lowest energy is in the ground state. The ground state system resembles a car parked on the streets of Denver. You can’t go any lower, even if it’s significantly higher than sea level.
Illustration: Quanta Magazine
Still, Hotta seems to have found an underground parking lot. To unlock the gate, he realized, one only had to tap into the inherent entanglement of the crackling of the quantum field.
Constant vacuum fluctuations cannot be used to power a perpetual motion machine, as the fluctuations at a given location are completely random. If you imagine connecting a fancy quantum battery to a vacuum, half the fluctuations will charge the device and the other half will drain it.
But quantum fields are entangled, and fluctuations in one place tend to coincide with fluctuations in another. In 2008, Hotta published a paper outlining how two of his physicists, Alice and Bob, exploit these correlations to extract energy from the ground state around Bob. The scheme looks like this:
Bob realized he needed energy. He wants to charge a fancy quantum battery, but all he has access to is empty space. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a well-equipped physics laboratory far away. Alice measures magnetic fields in her lab, injects energy into them, and learns about their fluctuations. In this experiment the entire field changes from the ground state, but as far as Bob knows, his vacuum remains in the lowest energy state and fluctuates randomly.
But then Alice ends up texting Bob her findings about the vacuum around her location and telling Bob when to plug in the battery. After reading her message, Bob can use her newfound knowledge of her to prepare an experiment to extract energy from the vacuum (up to the amount Alice injected).
“That information allows Bob to time fluctuations if he wants to,” said Eduardo Martín Martínez, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute who worked on one of the new experiments. rice field. (He added that the concept of timing is more metaphorical than literal because of the abstract nature of quantum fields.)
Energy is conserved because Bob cannot extract more energy than Alice put in. And since he lacks the knowledge necessary to extract the energy until Alice’s text arrives, there is no faster-than-light effect. This protocol does not violate sacred physical principles.
