Historical research guide · 0004 · 1989
Energy conversion using high charge density
Kenneth R. Shoulders · Jupiter Toy Co
In one minute
Kenneth Shoulders spent the 1980s watching something that ought not to hold together: a bundle of electrons about a micrometre across, carrying on the order of 10¹¹ charges with almost no positive ions to neutralise them, travelling at a tenth of the speed of light and staying bound. He named it Electrum Validum — EV — and this granted US patent is his account of how to make one, how to steer it along a channel cut in quartz, and how to take energy back out of it. The energy claim is the striking one. With a travelling-wave conductor running beside the channel, Shoulders reports an output pulse carrying up to ninety-six times the energy of the input pulse that produced the entity, and writes that the ultimate source of this energy appears to be the zero-point radiation of the vacuum continuum. For that physics he points to Boyer on the classical vacuum and to Forward on drawing electrical energy out of the zero-point field.
Connection
This is the document chapter 6 stands on when it says a device can draw on the vacuum, and chapter 9’s closest laboratory relative of a self-organised ball of charge — an orb small enough to sit on a chip. It approaches the Coulomb barrier from the charge-density side, where chapter 12 approaches it from the lattice side.
From the source
An EV is a discrete, self-contained bundle of predominantly electrons, about one micrometre across and as small as 0.1 micrometre, carrying on the order of 10¹¹ uncompensated charges with at most one positive ion per 100,000 electrons; Shoulders holds that it is bound by electromagnetic fields set up among its own electrons rather than by any external field, and that its charge-to-mass ratio measures close to that of a free electron.Description of preferred embodiments, §1
Lone entities are rarely seen. They link like beads in a chain and close into rings as large as 20 micrometres across, a typical ten-bead ring carrying about 10¹² charges, and all the binding energies involved appear to exceed the chemical binding energy of materials.Description of preferred embodiments, §1
A negative pulse on the order of 10 kV applied to a pointed cathode resting on a quartz dielectric produces the entities at the cathode tip; they run along the dielectric surface to the anode, leave an optically visible streak, and damage a conducting witness foil where they strike — which is how their production and landing points are detected.Description of preferred embodiments, §2, FIGS. 1–3
Sending an entity along a travelling-wave conductor returns more energy than was spent making it: Shoulders reports a corrected conversion factor of 0.81 with a 600 ns input pulse, rising to ninety-six times the input energy when the input pulse is shortened to 5 ns, and notes an entity can be generated by a pulse as short as 10⁻³ ns.Description of preferred embodiments, §31
Shoulders writes that as an entity absorbs and emits electrons along the conductor, energy is delivered to the output and the ultimate source of this energy appears to be the zero-point radiation of the vacuum continuum, citing Boyer’s account of the classical vacuum in Scientific American (1985) and Forward’s 1984 Physical Review B paper on extracting electrical energy from the vacuum.Description of preferred embodiments, §31; Brief description of prior art
Because each converter is small enough for microlithography, the patent lays out banks and stacks — of the order of a thousand devices across an inch, a thousand layers to the inch, a million travelling-wave converters in roughly a cubic inch — together with a feedback loop that spends part of the output making the next entity, and a circulator that re-uses the same entity for many passes.Description of preferred embodiments, §31, FIGS. 89–95
The way in
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5018180A/enHow to cite it
Kenneth R. Shoulders, Jupiter Toy Co (1989) Energy conversion using high charge density US5018180A