Electromagnetic to Gravitational wave Conversion via Nuclear Holonomy
Giorgio Fontana · Bernd Binder · Glen A. Robertson
Summary and citation · read the original at the source · none found
In one page
Making a gravitational wave in a laboratory is the oldest piece of unfinished business in this field. Any device that could do it needs two ends: a charged end for the driving electromagnetic field to take hold of, and a massive end whose lopsided shape — its quadrupole moment — pushes on spacetime. The obstacle has always been efficiency. Early studies concluded that any such converter would be destroyed by the energy poured into it long before it radiated anything a detector could see. Giorgio Fontana, Bernd Binder and Glen Robertson propose moving the whole converter inside the nucleus. There, they argue, the geometric quantity called holonomy and the spin-precession coupling that goes with it could let a slow driving field ring a fast quadrupole spin on high harmonics. That is worth doing because radiated power climbs as the sixth power of frequency: multiply the frequency by ten to a thousand and the power rises by six to eighteen orders of magnitude. Run backwards, the same device is an antenna.
Why it matters hereChapter 10 says electromagnetism and gravity meet through fields, phase and geometry rather than through masses pulling on each other, and this paper takes that literally down to nuclear scale — the converter is a spin, and the coupling is a holonomy. Chapter 4 needs a laboratory source of gravitational radiation before metric engineering is an engineering subject at all, and chapter 12 recognises the same move it makes: drive a nucleus with an outside field and let the nucleus do the work. Read it with Fontana and Baker on gravitational waves inducing nuclear fusion at /library/stm-16344796f3 and with the Chongqing group’s photon-by-photon detector budget at /library/stm-c15757c634.
What it claims
01An electromagnetic to gravitational wave converter is characterised by two ends: an electrically or magnetically charged end that couples to the exciting electromagnetic field, and a massive end carrying a mechanical quadrupole moment, which couples to the gravitational field.Abstract, first sentence
Published and peer-reviewed02The efficiency of the conversion appears to be very low, so early theoretical studies concluded that whatever system was considered would be destroyed by the excitation energy before it could emit detectable gravitational waves; recent studies are more optimistic because advanced detectors move the threshold of detection, and a Hertz-like experiment for gravitational waves responds to improvements in the generator as well as in the receiver.Abstract, sentences 2 to 4
What to watch03The proposal is that within the nucleus, nuclear holonomy and the corresponding spin-precession coupling may lead to a high-frequency quadrupole spin resonating on high-order harmonics of a low-frequency precession excitation frequency, which is what raises the efficiency of the conversion process.Abstract, sentence 4, main clause
Designed, not yet built04The argument rests on conservation laws of holonomy and spin describing the orbital and radial behaviour of angular momentum and torque currents in systems with spin-orbit coupling, with two constraints doing the work — spin conservation, which is linear, and holonomy, which is transcendental.Abstract, sentence 5
Designed, not yet built05The power emitted as gravitational waves by a given configuration is proportional to the sixth power of the frequency.Abstract, sentence 6, first clause
Settled physics06So a precession-to-spin frequency up-conversion by a factor of ten to a thousand, of the kind that can be observed even in mechanical model systems, would raise the power emitted by the carrier by six to eighteen orders of magnitude; a phase-frequency modulation could be impressed on the signal by an additional nuclear magnetic resonance signal precessing at special magic angles in a modulated magnetic field, and run in reverse the same system becomes an active gravitational wave antenna whose frequency down-conversion eases the processing of the received signal.Abstract, sentences 6 to 8
Designed, not yet built
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3115561SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. Published in AIP Conference Proceedings 1103, pages 524 to 531, the proceedings of the Space, Propulsion and Energy Sciences International Forum of February 2009; the paper carries no Creative Commons statement and OpenAlex, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar all return closed with no repository copy, and INSPIRE record 822711 holds the metadata with no attached document — all checked 2026-09-08. No text of the paper is reproduced here. The summary and the claims were written from the authors’ own published abstract, which is carried in full by both the OpenAlex and the INSPIRE records for this work; the locators cite that abstract sentence by sentence. AUTHORSHIP. Crossref and OpenAlex both list three authors, Giorgio Fontana, Bernd R. Binder and Glen A. Robertson, and that is the list kept here; the INSPIRE record for the same paper names only Fontana and Binder, and the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved. Companion works in this library: Fontana and Baker on high-frequency gravitational waves inducing nuclear fusion at /library/stm-16344796f3, and the Chongqing detector study at /library/stm-c15757c634.
How to cite it
Giorgio Fontana, Bernd Binder, Glen A. Robertson (2009) Electromagnetic to Gravitational wave Conversion via Nuclear Holonomy. doi:10.1063/1.3115561
Where it sits in the curriculum
Scalar waves and the field behind the fieldsThe metric, warp drives and wormholesLattice confinement fusion