Historical research guide · 0347 · 2024
Investigation of the Alzofon weight reduction experiment using NMR spectroscopy
Willy Stark · Hans-Joachim Grafe · Martin Tajmar
In one minute
Frederick Alzofon proposed that gravity arises from the way subatomic particles share energy, and that briefly ordering the nuclear spins inside a solid, then letting them fall back into disorder, would weaken that sharing so the object grew lighter for a moment. In 1994 he reported exactly that: about a milligram off a 1.1 gram sample. Willy Stark, Hans-Joachim Grafe and Martin Tajmar, at TU Dresden and the Leibniz Institute IFW Dresden, went looking for it with better instruments. They hung small spheres of aluminium, brass, aluminium oxide, PTFE and the superconductor YBCO from a thin bending beam inside a 9 tesla magnet at five kelvin, flipped the nuclear spins with radio pulses, and watched the beam with a laser interferometer good to a fraction of a microgram. At low pulse counts nothing moved. At high pulse counts a clean, repeatable deflection appeared, the size Alzofon reported — and then it appeared again with no sample hanging on the beam. It tracked temperature: the pulses were warming the helium and bending the laser’s own path.
Connection
Chapter 11 is where gravity-control claims get tested rather than repeated, and the Tajmar group’s method is the model the site holds up: follow the signal until you know exactly what it is. This paper hands the chapter a hard-won instrument lesson — a laser interferometer watching a hanging weight in cold gas will read a heating pulse as a weight loss — and it names precisely what the null does and does not cover, because NMR polarises far fewer nuclei than the pulsed dynamic nuclear polarisation Alzofon actually used.
From the source
Alzofon’s proposal is that the gravitational force arises from the interaction of subatomic particles whose internal energy distributions, set by their Compton wavelength, overlap and draw each other in — and that the gravitational force between the particles of a system falls while an ordered system retrogrades into a disordered one, so pulsed dynamic nuclear polarisation should produce a transient loss of weight.Introduction, Equation 1 and the discussion following it
With pulse numbers low enough to leave the apparatus cold, and sufficient to polarise the nuclei, no weight change was detected at all, at resolutions of about 0.38 micrograms for YBCO, 1.9 micrograms for PTFE and 9.4 micrograms for aluminium oxide — so the milligram-scale effect Alzofon reported was not reproduced by NMR nuclear spin polarisation.Section Measurements, setups C, D and E; Figures 10 and 11; Table 8
With high pulse counts a clean and repeatable deflection of the bending beam did appear, reaching an apparent mass change of about 0.47 milligrams for aluminium and for brass, comparable in size to the 1.1 milligrams Alzofon reported, and it grew with longer pulses, more pulses and shorter intervals between them — that is, with the radiofrequency power delivered.Section Measurements, setups F and G; Figures 12 to 16
The same deflection appeared with no specimen hanging on the beam at all, and the deflection curve tracked the measured temperature almost exactly: the pulses warmed the surrounding helium, its density and therefore its refractive index changed along the interferometer’s beam path, and the instrument read that as a deflection. Every measured deflection turned out to be a temperature artefact.Figures 17 to 20; Equations 8 to 14; Discussion
The null is bounded, and the authors bound it themselves: NMR polarises at least ten times fewer nuclei than the dynamic nuclear polarisation Alzofon used, the expected polarisation at 9 tesla and 5 kelvin is only 0.28 percent for aluminium-27, 0.12 percent for copper-63 and 0.087 percent for fluorine-19, and in the metals the skin depth confines the drive to 9.2 micrometres for aluminium and 14.9 micrometres for brass, with a London penetration depth near 0.15 micrometres for YBCO — leaving the polarised mass of aluminium, brass and YBCO at or below the noise floor.Discussion, Equation 7; Tables 2, 6, 7 and 8
For the two dielectrics, aluminium oxide and PTFE, the pulse penetrates the whole sample and the polarised mass is far above the noise, yet no deflection was seen at low pulse counts; the authors note the much longer spin-lattice relaxation time in dielectrics as a reason the effect could be weaker there, and close by stating that the effect in question is either not measurable using NMR spectroscopy, smaller than predicted, or non-existent.Discussion; Conclusion, final paragraph
The way in
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15529How to cite it
Willy Stark, Hans-Joachim Grafe, Martin Tajmar (2024) Investigation of the Alzofon weight reduction experiment using NMR spectroscopy doi:10.1016/j.measurement.2024.115075